Higher School Certificate students have access to a new, highly functional and user-friendly web site following the launch today of Students Online – a one-stop shop for HSC resources and first of its kind in Australia.

Office of the Board of Studies NSW General Manager, Dr John Bennett, said Students Online would offer a unique experience to 67,000 plus students by allowing them to customise the site while giving them access to HSC past papers, syllabuses, notes from HSC markers and other resources.

“This generation of students has never known a world without the World Wide Web and research has shown they prefer to obtain their information via the internet,” he said.

“The Board's web developers have taken advantage of the latest web technologies to maximise the usability of Students Online while ensuring the site is responsive and speedy.

“Features such as the ability to drag and edit pods have been added with the use of JavaScript and CSS to enhance usability and students' enjoyment of the site. In most cases, the site will degrade gracefully where the user does not have JavaScript turned on.

“Making sure load times are fast has been a priority. Ways we've achieved this have included minifying and combining our external assets such as JavaScript and CSS to decrease their file size, using compression to further decrease the size of the page coming from the server, and setting expires headers to decrease the number of user requests to the server.

“We also used Ajax to assist functionality and responsiveness and caching to speed up page requests, particularly under heavy load.”

Dr Bennett said Students Online offered students a range of benefits to enhance their study routine.

“The improved features of the site include:

• quick access to details of all the courses they are studying, past exam papers in those courses and their own personalised exam timetable
• access to a variety of pods, such as News, Past Papers and Practice Tests, and the ability to keep the ones they want and hide the ones they don't to create their own home page
• links to all relevant HSC materials, including key dates and news, syllabuses, notes from markers of previous exams and other related materials
• an interactive 'To Do' pod where they can make notes and set their study and assignment priorities
• an interactive essential links pod where students can add links to their favourite sites
• answers to more than 100 frequently asked questions about the HSC
• the ability to change their PIN and personal details online
• access to information from the Board, such as rankings.

“Each of the 67,000 plus students will have a unique experience when they log in using their student number and PIN, and will be able to use Students Online as their HSC home base.

“As a way of increasing traffic, the Board of Studies is offering a $50 book voucher to the 1000^th student to log in for the first time as well as to one student selected randomly from every five thousand unique students who log in up until 30 November 2008.”

Dr Bennett said Board of Studies web developers had closely followed renowned web performance expert Steve Souder's principles in making this a fast, high performance site.