HubbS: The Hub for Vocational Schools

Project Goal: Networking and Exchange in Vocational Training

The main goal of the project was the development of a platform that enables easy access to digital teaching materials and resources. Additionally, the platform was meant to promote collaboration and exchange among educators, state institutes, and ministries.

HubbS acts as a central hub and offers a powerful media library and an efficient search function. These features support not only collaborative work processes but also social interactions among teachers.

Through improved networking, valuable potentials are to be unlocked in order to lighten the load on teachers, strengthen the innovative capacity of schools, and enhance the quality of teaching.

Technical Implementation with Drupal: How HubbS Works

The technical foundation of HubbS is Drupal. It serves as an interface for professional exchange and networking in working groups, as well as for the collaborative creation of teaching materials.

1. Public Area

The public area offers an extensive media library with educational materials from various publishers, as well as information about professions, schools, and events.

Through well-thought-out categorization, users can specifically filter for teaching content, professions, or learning resources.

The content of the media library is regularly sourced from SODIX, the educational media content hub of the states, and updated through specially developed extensions for the Drupal Migrate module.

2. Community Area

The community area is available to registered teachers for collaboration, cooperation, and communication; it functions like a social network. Here, teachers and institutions can create their own materials, network, and develop content together.

This area offers a comprehensive portfolio of digital tools such as video conferencing, a web editor, or cloud solutions for data storage and management.

Open Social for Connected Educators: Features and Integration

The closed community of HubbS is based on the Drupal distribution Open Social, which has been specifically tailored to the platform's requirements.

This distribution enables comprehensive social networking features such as personal profile pages, social media streams, groups, messages, notifications, watchlists, as well as follow/unfollow options.

Additionally, extra features like friend requests and contact management have been specially developed to enhance user interaction.

To promote collaboration, external tools have been integrated:

• Nextcloud for file storage
• Jitsi for video conferencing

Design system for Hubbs

A central element of our project was the development of a comprehensive design system based on the atomic design principle. With around 15 different page types and over 70 modular components, a scalable and consistent basis was created for the entire UI.

The implementation was carried out in Storybook, a proven tool for documenting, visualizing and testing components. Storybook ideally supports the design system approach: it enables the isolated development and preview of each individual component - from simple atoms to complex templates - and thus promotes reusability, quality assurance and consistent design across all parts of the application.

Conclusion: An Innovative Hub for Dual Vocational Training with Drupal

HubbS is a groundbreaking example of modern educational platforms in the dual education system. With Drupal as its technical foundation, HubbS offers an innovative solution that connects teachers, students, and institutions in vocational education and elevates collaboration to a new level.

This successful implementation demonstrates how flexible and powerful Drupal can be used in complex educational projects.