Foreign Service Institute to join online training program

Select courses offered by the State Department's Foreign Service Institute soon will become available online to the foreign affairs community, through a memorandum of understanding signed between the Office of Personnel Management and FSI.

FSI will become a content provider in OPM's e-Training Service Provider Consortium, according to an announcement last week, and will be the preferred provider for agencies seeking foreign affairs-related courses.

The OPM e-training initiative, which makes professional development courses available online to civil servants, is one of 24 e-government projects included in the President's Management Agenda and is one of five of those initiatives managed by OPM.

Three other programs -- OPM's GoLearn, the National Security Agency's FasTrac and the Commerce Department's National Technical Information Service -- contribute general content and services, including learning management systems, systems integration and contracting vehicles, to the e-training initiative.

But FSI marks the first participant brought in for its specialized content. Jeff Pon, e-training initiative acting project manager at OPM, said he aims to include additional qualified content providers over the next few years.

Cost efficiencies and interoperability are major advantages of bringing in more content, Pon said. "This initiative helps government buy at [bulk] prices, so we've driven down the cost of a lot of these courses across the federal government," he said. FSI content in the system will fit into the federal IT framework and will use a standardized "searchable content object reference model," allowing agencies to easily adapt existing content to their needs.

FSI plans to offer 44 different online courses in fiscal 2006, said Tom McMann, the institute's information resources manager. In addition to beginning and advanced language instruction, the catalog includes a course called "Working in an Embassy" that is required of all federal employees before being stationed at an overseas embassy for the first time.

The FSI online course catalog will offer both self-study and mentored programs, and course availability will evolve as demand warrants, McMann said. "Online training tends to take less time than working in a classroom," he said, noting that the embassy orientation takes two days in person but can be completed in eight to 10 hours through e-training.

The online courses, like those in the classroom, will be available to federal employees on a reimbursable basis using training request form SF-182, or its Defense Department equivalent form DD-1556. FSI is hoping to get its online offerings integrated into the e-training course catalog in two to three months. In the meantime, federal employees can call the institute to enroll for both online and classroom study, McMann said.

OPM's e-training initiative won an award last year from the Industry Advisory Council for demonstrating best practices in federal e-government implementations. Both OPM and State received "yellow" status ratings for their e-government programs on the Bush administration's most recent quarterly management agenda score card, though they each earned the highest "green" rating for progress.