HEC Paris

A Knowledge Management Platform for Europe's Leading Business School

Built with Nuxeo Document Management, K-Hub is a new service available to all professors and instructors at HEC, Europe’s leading business school and recognized world leader in Executive Education. A true "hub" of knowledge, it allows them to have, for each course, an online space used to distribute documents and interact with their students. It will eventually become the single point of access for the educational resources of all the teaching programs at HEC.

The Context

The principle behind K-Hub is straightforward: each course has a workspace that can be managed by one or more instructors and is automatically available to students enrolled in this course.

Within this space, instructors can distribute their course materials in any format and reference external resources, such as podcasts or their personal web sites. They can also interact with students. Ease of use is key.

The core feature set centers on the high priority needs of professors, such as managing a document repository and organizing content by session, sending messages to some or all of their students, receiving homework, and grading it. Added to that are some essential Web 2.0 features, such as forums and blogs.

The solution is available via an interface that was specifically designed to facilitate user adoption of K-Hub. None of the pages have more than 5 buttons, and the 4-page user guide is easily accessible.

The Solution

The K-Hub project requires a smooth integration with the rest of the IT systems, including the ERP for higher education and the intranet portal.The choice of technology was therefore oriented towards an open content management platform that complies with Java / JEE standards.

 -- Gael Boisseau, Head of IT Development, HEC Paris

HEC viewed this project as a content management solution rather than a more traditional Learning Management System (LMS), making it a tool for exchanging information and documents, rather than e-Learning in the strict sense.

Nuxeo Document Management was chosen after studying propietary LMS solutions, such as Blackboard, and open source solutions, such as Moodle. The functional scope of these solutions appeared too limited for the requirements of this project. The ability to develop custom user interfaces and extensive opportunities for integration are the key factors that eventually led the project team to choose  Nuxeo DM.

Strong integration with the existing IT infrastructure
All read / write permissions are inherited from the student information system, so the instructor does not have to manage access rights. All enrolled students, and only those who are enrolled, can access course materials. This integration required the development of complex business rules and an ETL. The data structure of a student information management system is rather complex, with each student having an  individualized path.

A tailored user interface
Building interfaces totally independent of the Nuxeo DM interface required complex development work, in order to maintain application performance. The objective was to move away as much as possible from the ergonomics of a conventional ECM tool. The K-Hub interface was one of the main challenges of the project, but also the key to its success. This was made possible by the platform approach of Nuxeo and the availability of high quality user interface development components.

Next Steps

In the first half of 2011, K-Hub was tested with a small group of 15 volunteer instructors. After a successful first phase, the application will be made available to professors of Business School, Specialized Masters, and MBA programs at the beginning of the school year.

Besides the opening of the K-Hub platform to all of the business programs at HEC, upcoming developments will involve integration with other components of the IT infrastructure.

The next phase of development includes an integration with the WCMS that instructors use for their personal websites as well as an integration with the tool used for generating podcasts of the class sessions. HEC will then have, with K-Hub, a unified multimedia knowledge management platform that fulfills the needs of teachers and students.