FSI_LMS_Industry_Day_Minutes.pdf

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FSI learning Management System Industry Day

January 18, 2018

Minutes

Opening remarks presented by MR. DAVID ETHERTON: So thank you, everybody. Welcome, everyone, to the Foreign Service Institute's Learning Management System Industry Day, where you'll be hearing from a variety of stakeholders within the Institute about their experiences with providing training to our students, and how technology has been and would like to be applied to support our instructional and compliance needs.

My name is David Etherton. I lead the IT Program Coordination Unit here at the Institute, and I'll be your facilitator for today's event, with support from representatives from our schools, our registrar's office, and our technology support organizations who are responsible for providing, managing, and automating training services here at the Institute.

Our purpose here today is to present additional information and context for our possible future procurement of the learning management system to you, representatives from industry, who may be responding to this effort upon the release of a future solicitation. This effort represents one of great significance for the Institute, as it promises to transform for the better how we deliver our training services, and alter the way we conduct our business. For this reason, we are holding out great hopes for the value and expertise you, industry, can provide to us to help support the

Institute's important global training mission.

Today's event provides us with an opportunity for FSI to express its needs to you in person, to provide additional context around the requirements written in the recently released request for information, and to gather your questions and feedback about them in support of the potential upcoming LMS procurement.

There we go.

Before covering today's agenda, I'd like to share some administrative notes to be aware of during your time here at the facility.

For safety awareness-- in the event of a fire alarm, please use the closest exit and move away from the building at least 100 feet. In case of an external threat-- as unlikely as it will be, but in case it does happen-- shelter in place and wait for instructions. For those that like to smoke, no smoking is permitted within any of the buildings, but you are allowed to smoke at least 25 feet away from any building entrance.

So a lot of our smokers, they like to smoke on the top of the hill back here. So, if you choose to do so, you can go out these doors, and then just walk to the top of the hill. And then you'll be able to smoke at that point.

Our restrooms-- you can go outside these doors here, take a right, and you'll find them in the hallway behind us. OK? Should you go beyond that point, our support staff or campus security

2 | P a g e will direct you back to this location-- unless, of course, you have a badge already, or you're with somebody with escort privileges.

For the lunch break today, we're offering food at FSI's cafeteria. You can go there, purchase your lunch. They have a variety of different things-- salads, hot, cold foods, sushi, et cetera, et cetera--mostly a way of pay arrangement. But that cafeteria is located actually behind you, up the hill, and then you'll see it denoted by Building C, there will be a sign that says Building C, and then that's where you will be able to eat lunch today. And as far as electronics, if everyone would please silence their cellphones, we will be greatly appreciative.

All right.

Now that our administrative notes are taken care of, I would like to introduce our panel members who will be with you today. We will first be hearing from our contracting officer, Malik Simone, who will be providing you with important details on how this procurement will be structured, the timing, and the rules on how to respond appropriately. [INAUDIBLE] couldn't be here. He commutes from Richmond, so there were some weather-related issues, I suppose, down there, and Malik was kind enough to step in in his place, today-- help us out.

At around 10:20, we will be hearing from our training technology representatives here at the

Institute, including our Deputy Executive Director for Information Technology, Hassan, our current learning management system, AKA LearnCenter Team Lead, Robert Becker, and from our Instructional Support Divisions Mark Jarnagin where our instructional design and content creation is performed.

From our schools, we'll be hearing from our lead technologist from FSI's School of Language

Studies, Tiffany Taylor Attaway, from our Diplomatic Mastery course coordinator, Dr. Craig

Hayden, who represents FSI's School for Professional and Area Studies, from our e-learning specialist, Sam Fellows, who represents FSI's Leadership and Management School, from our

Branch Chief for Curriculum and Staff Development, Brian Law, who represents FSI's School for Applied Information Technology, and wrapping up, this morning, will be our business analyst, Linda Eduful, from FSI's Registrar's Office, where the majority of the Institute's training management and administrative processing needs are met.

As you can see, we have gathered before you today a wide range of perspectives on training needs here within the Institute, and so we hope we can provide you with the essential information you need today.

In addition, we also have seated in the front row of our audience support representatives from our schools or offices, who, depending on the nature of your questions may be asked to provide additional detail during this afternoon's Q&A session-- which leads me to how we will be handling today's Q&A process.

Industry day events commonly provide an opportunity for industry to sit down with procurement stakeholders in one or more private one-on-one sessions to ask questions and give feedback.

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However-- and thankfully-- due to the significant level of interest in this effort, we have altered our approach a bit.

When you arrived, you will have picked up a package of items from the entry table-- your name tag, a pamphlet summarizing today's event, and three index cards with spaces to write your and your company's name on the back. As you hear from our panel members here, you will likely have questions to ascertain additional detail needed to tailor the LMS solution to meet the

Institute's needs, or comments to help us refine a future solicitation.

Our request is that you write down one question or comment per index card during our panel presentation, and drop them off in the boxes provided in the hall, outside, to your left, when we release for the lunch period today at 11:40. There are two sets of boxes, one set outside of each exit door of this room on this side. The boxes are marked with each school or organization's name.

If your question is not school- or organization-specific, we will also have a general box where you can deposit your questions, as well. Comments will not be shared or published. They will be used at the discretion of the government to finalize market research and help further develop a future solicitation.

Now, for any part-time or aspiring doctors that we happen to have in the audience today who plan to write their index cards with prescription fonts that only their assistants can understand every once in a while, we humbly ask your support in writing very clearly for us, as our panel would like to be able to read them easily. Otherwise, we may have to send those cards to our handwriting forensics lab, also known as the wastebasket, for further analysis. Kidding aside, everyone please write your questions clearly-- or feedback clearly-- on the cards so our panel can best serve your information needs.

In addition, it would be very helpful to our panel if you could indicate in the top-right corner if your question is technical in nature, business in nature, or procurement in nature. During the lunch period, our panel members will be sorting the questions-- that didn't go to the forensics lab-- according to who will best answer them, and our panel members will be answering as many as practicable during the afternoon session. Any questions that are not answered verbally today will be responded to in writing in the next several weeks, and will be posted to the FedBizOpps website.

You will also notice that we have microphones-- well, you won't notice that, because we pushed them in the back, but we will have microphones positioned at the front of each aisle for the Q&A session in the afternoon. And what we ask at that time is, when you have your follow-up questions during the Q&A session, that you only ask one and allow it to rotate around the room.

You'll have an opportunity, we have plenty of time to circle the room, but we just want to make sure that all people have an opportunity to participate.

Thanks to everyone for your patience, and now we'll hear from our panel.

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At this time, I would like to introduce our Contracting Officer for this procurement, Malik

Simone.

MR. MALIK SIMONE: Good morning. Good morning, thank you for attending FSI's industry day. Primarily we're here today to gather industry feedback concerning this future acquirement.

We would also like to provide you with opportunity to assist us in clarifying and identifying our best solutions for the LMS.

The major points of consideration for today's meeting are, one, the government is currently only conducting market research. Two, a single award is contemplated. Also, the period of performance is anticipated to be between five to seven years. In regards to timing, the government is considering the third quarter, more likely to fourth quarter of FY, 2018.

FedBizOpps will remain the central point of information. Therefore, we strongly advise you to follow up on FedBizOpps for any updates to include the release of a future RFP.

Next slide, please?

There is a dedicated email address in regards to today's activity, and I invited you to take note of that email address. In addition, FedBizOpps, like I mentioned, remains the central point of contact, the central point of information as well. So if you will, please stay abreast with FBO in terms of following up on any future releases.

And that's it. Thank you.

MR. DAVID ETHERTON: All right, absolutely. At this time I'd like to introduce Hassan

[INAUDIBLE], who's going to provide us with an overview of training technologies here at the

Institute.

HASSAN: Good morning, and welcome. My name is Hassan [INAUDIBLE]. I am the deputy at

FSI, I'm responsible with the help of four divisions at FSI for deployment of technologies at FSI, but before delving into technologies, let me start with saying a few words about FSI and its mission in general.

We last year celebrated the 70 years of FSI's establishment. We were established in 1947 as a new service, graduate-level training Institute for the State Department. And as a training arm for the State Department, we are responsible to provide training to Foreign Service, Civil Service, locally employed staff, on very limited basis to contractors when there is a state-specific course, and eligible family members, and also we have customers from many other agencies, particularly agencies with overseas mission.

FSI's initial offering many, many years ago-- I think I was not born yet, even though I'm very old-- but that was about 13 languages, and only about 3,000 enrollments. When later on, we can see the current in numbers, we see the immense growth at FSI. In 2002 we basically marked changing-- or expanding our model from-- the delivery model-- from a purely classroom-based

5 | P a g e to virtual. We acquired the system from a vendor called learn.com, and it is called FSI

LearnCenter. We'll talk a little bit more about that as we go on.

Let's go to what we're doing in terms of training, now, at FSI. I have been here for about 20 years, and I have seen immense growth, not only in numbers, but also in the quality and the complexity of the training FSI provides-- not only depending on technology, but also based on the creativity and innovative approach that the schools have had in last 20 years. But the numbers also are very indicative of this growth. We train more than 50 other government agencies, we have about 800 course offerings of about 600 on campus, and about 275 design and custom-built applications-- custom-built courses here at FSI, by our instructional design team, with the help of our colleagues in the schools. About 170,000 enrollments annually.

The staff expertise has a full range of functional and thematic area. Obviously being Department of the State, a lot of our focus is on diplomatic tradecraft, but training includes management, IT, and regional-- and leadership. That's a very large focus at the Department of State.

Let's take a look at all those additional structures, because that does reflect the division of responsibility. While we all share-- I would say there are a common set of responsibilities among all of us, between our school, front office, our Office of Director, and in Educational Policy

Division that is responsible for providing policy and governance. But the division of all those issues chart highlights for you the way we have set the roles.

And schools provide training, and that's why they were-- the four schools will provide you the details on what's key and important to them when it comes to learning management system, and basically to the authoring aspect of our environment. Office of the Director provides direction, obviously. Educational Policy is responsible for coordination and setting standards, common standards across the school. And EX Director not only provides support, but also ensures the legislation and manager requirement by government are met, whether through our systems or through processes.

Next, I think now we can delve into my favorite topic, which is IT at FSI, and training systems at

FSI. We've conceptually divided them in three categories. They are very well-linked and integrated, so this is only a conceptual division, and it helps for you to focus on the two latter part of the slide which deals with training delivery, and design and development.

Let me say a little bit about the training management, because that's the core of a lot of things that happen here on a daily basis. This core system, that category is called Student Training

Management System. It's very, very, old, and I would say, not the prettiest system in the world.

But it's very complicated, and I'd say it provides immense amounts of data, and that's because of the years that we have had it here-- for about 18 years-- so we've done a lot of integration between that system and everything else. That has allowed kind of reducing duplication of effort between various systems. But, of course, as I've mentioned, it is really not very pretty.

The second category is the training delivery. That's where the learning management system, the core learning management system, FSI LearnCenter, resides. A little bit of brief history of it-- we purchased a system, we acquired a system in 2002, late in 2002. Early 2003, we implemented it.

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Not long after we did that, we identified a lot of, I would say, not deficiencies, but a kind of mismatch between what the department needed in terms of reporting, particularly government-mandated requirements for reporting. And what the system provided, when we went to the vendor, vendor had indicated that with all the commitments they had to many, many other customers, they couldn't meet any of our deadlines.

Therefore we, after a lot of decision-making processes, we concluded that it is better for us to take over the code. We bought the code, we built all the capacities that were needed. And also, in response to ongoing needs from schools and from management, we've built-- since then, we've built into that application certain additional capacities.

One additional benefit was that we managed to get the system integrated very well with the

STMS, again, eliminating a lot of additional steps that people had to go-- particularly schools and registrar, if we had to have two separate systems. But obviously what that meant-- it resulted in an increasing gap between what our system capabilities were, in terms of learning, functions that were needed, and being more students and it be more modern. And in comparison to newer products in the market, we clearly feel that we are behind. And that's where we are very focused on the training delivery mechanism, and what we would like to hear from people in the future.

Training design and development is a category that impacts not only schools, but our own internal-- the EX entities that provide support for schools in terms of creating content. That's where course altering happens, that's where instructional design aspects of-- And the systems over there are wider and varied. We don't need as much centralization over there. We would like to continue having the creativity that is allowed, because of the fact that people are more comfortable with various tools.

But those two areas are the focus of what our learning management system efforts are, in terms of acquisition process.

I'll move to-- I'll turn to Robert Becker who has led our development efforts for the Learn

Management System for, I would say, nine years-- didn't realize that, so, thank you very much.

MR. ROBERT BECKER: Good morning. I don't think this is working. Good morning, everyone.

The slide that you're viewing right now provides an overview of the components that we use at

FSI to deliver online training. Training comes in two avenues of content delivery. One avenue is the courses-- and that's handled by my colleague to my left, ISD-- Instructional Support

Division-- they make sure the courses are working, tracking, bookmarking, going to complete.

And the second side of the coin is the virtual learning spaces, or eHomerooms, and I'll get into that in a little bit.

Another component that we have are surveys. We need feedback from the courses to make sure that the content is relevant, the instructions are clear, things are in a logical order, and that there's no errors within the course itself.

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Another component that we have is with videos. With the rapid changes in technology, streaming videos have become an important key piece in training and content delivery. Microsoft web servers do not really have the built-in capabilities for streaming, so we acquired [INAUDIBLE] to provide that better experience for users.

And another component is the web conferencing, and another survey. And those surveys are mainly used for physical classroom training-- how the training went, how the event went, was the presenter knowledgeable, was the material OK, did the instructors bring donuts-- things like that. Kidding.

For the web conferencing, we have Adobe Connect. Everyone knows what Adobe Connect is, virtual classrooms, large-scale webinars, online meeting for collaboration. Next slide, please.

So training, as I mentioned, has now moved from being a static to a more interactive and dynamic piece. To support that, we've created eHomerooms, which are virtual training spaces for learners to download material, upload material, privileged users instructors can create pages, edit pages, create assignments, quizzes. This is a space where there could be resource materials, announcements, there could be incentives in the form of badges, and in discussions such as real time chat features, discussion boards, simple things like, hey, is my instructor in, office hours, different calendars, and polling features, dynamic content aspects. So that is eHomerooms, in a nutshell.

MARK JARNAGIN: Thank you, Rob. My name is Mark Jarnagin. I represent our Instructional

Support Division, and we're the division is primarily responsible for training design and development. We support the schools and centers here at FSI in creating instructional technology solutions, as well as technology-based training tools.

This slide that you see now kind of gives you a very broad oversight of our five major areas, curriculum design services which would include, of course, instructional design and survey evaluations types of services, e-learning courseware development is probably-- historically has been, and probably still is-- our largest area, and most germane to the current LMS. We also now have an increasingly robust development area for developing mobile training apps, and these are all bolstered by a considerable multimedia design services area, as well as a quality assurance services group that we utilize.

One thing that's not included in this particular slide is something that we're delving more into, and that is something called virtual instructional sessions or VILTs, a lot of them-- a lot of you are probably already familiar with that kind of training. And we've long been involved in developing materials for classroom services, as well.

Some of the other things that we are involved in and support through our division are-- we have five multimedia labs spread across two campuses that are primarily used by our School of

Language Studies for supplemental training. We also have a recording studio and we also support the Information Center, which is basically the library for FSI. We have a considerable circulation of books and media from that information center.

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Getting back more to this particular area of training design and development, we do utilize both

GOTS and COTS, as well as our own customized tools to build courseware apps and other materials, as well as to support instructional design and standards validation-- which is very important in the government. As I mentioned before, our largest endeavor, historically, has been to design, develop, test, and evaluate courses for the department, and also other agencies. We've developed about 300 such courses since 2001. About 250 of these courses are still active, and most of those are hosted on the LMS.

And one thing that's important to point out in that area that's relative to this discussion is, we do need to be SCORM compliant and Section 508 conformant. So any kinds of discussions we have about a future LMS solution will need to involve government standards validation, whether it includes those specific standards, or future validation standards down the road.

Another area, as I discussed, is, the last decade or so, we've been conducting mobile training development, both on iOS and on Android platforms. We've developed about 28 apps so far, hosted on both platforms. These are credentialed and hosted on our LMS, though they don't exactly interact with it at the moment. As I mentioned, we're a government shop, so we need to adhere to Section 508 accessibility standards which are promulgated by the Federal Government.

To do this, we use both manual procedures and automated tools that we've purchased and developed to ensure this 508 compliance. And we've also recently been using the Department of

Homeland Security's trusted tester process, which is now being required by our department.

Finally, in our multimedia labs, we host language learning sessions, which provide resources such as audio and visual materials. We host access to online materials as well as software that we've purchased. We also host and support materials that have been developed in-house, using some of the tools that we support.

So that's basically a summary of training design and development in that area, and I'm going to turn it back over to David.

MR. ETHERTON: All right, thanks very much, Mark, appreciate that. And thanks for giving us an overview of training technologies here at the Institute. At this time, we're going to go ahead--actually, I don't have a break slide, but we promised you a break, and so we'll take that break.

Why don't we take 10 minutes, and then just rest and relax. And then we'll meet back here, why don't we say, 10:40.

All right everyone, see if we-- please be seated. All right.

OK, good, welcome back everybody. Thanks for bearing with us. We're a little ahead of schedule, so be a little flexible on the time, here. But the next portion of our agenda today is dedicated to hearing from our schools on their experience with using today's training technology here at the Institute, and their vision for an LMS solution in the future. Our schools will provide you with information on their specific training missions, characterize their use of the

LearnCenter-- or current LMS-- and share their vision for their preferred elements of the future.

Tiffany, if you would lead us off?

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MS. TIFFANY ATTAWAY: Okay. Good morning. My name is Tiffany Attaway, and I'm the educational technologist from the School of Language Studies. And today I'd like to share with you what SLS does, how we use our LMS, and our vision for the future. So SLS provides language training-- could you go to the next slide please-- in approximately 70 languages. We are the biggest school on campus. We're also the best school on campus. Our students are primarily Foreign Service Officers who come to us with a job-related need to learn the language.

We also, in some cases, teach family members of Foreign Service Officers and employees of other government agencies.

So there's two main groups of language students in SLS. The first type, and our primary audience, are our on-site language students who attend classes here on campus at FSI. And we taught approximately 1,500 language students in FY17, in everything from Albanian to Urdu.

Students are in instructor-led classes five hours a day, five days a week, and are expected to do another three hours of self-study each day. Language courses last anywhere from 23 to 88 weeks depending on the language and the requirements of the job.

We have approximately 450 language instructors, and another 150 supervisory and support staff.

Classes at SLS are small, generally only three to four people per class, and we use many types of technology, including smart panels, foreign language videos, and social media.

And I'd like to just take a moment to talk about the test. Can I see the testing unit back there, so if I get something wrong, shout out. So the final assessment of whether students have met their training requirement is the language proficiency test, which is a two-hour test of speaking and reading proficiency in the target language. We administer over 4,000 language tests a year to both Foreign Service students and employees from several federal government agencies, including many who are coming to us for testing without having gone through our language training here at FSI.

So the other key population that uses the LMS is our distance learning students. We have a robust distance learning program that is almost 20 years old at this point. Not all of our distance learning students are required to learn a language for the job, but like our on-site students, many of them are Foreign Service Officers.

Our distance learning program offers 73 courses in 18 languages, and they're offered three times a year. In FY17, we had approximately 2,500 enrollments. And courses in the distance learning program are anywhere from four to 14 weeks, so they're much shorter than our on-site courses, but the courses are either one-on-one or small group, and they are all virtual instructor-led courses. They're led by a staff of 45 language mentors, and in most cases students meet synchronously with their teacher one hour a week, and the rest of the time-- about six to eight hours a week-- is spent in self-study. Students are scattered across the globe in multiple time zones, and they often may be in a location where they either have weak or intermittent internet connections.

Next slide.

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So, how we use our LMS right now. For our on-site students, some language sections use the

LearnCenter eHomeroom, which Robert talked about earlier, as portals for supplementary materials that instructors can post and students can access during self-study time. Now, several of our sections have opted to use, as an alternative, the department's FAN system. FAN, the

Foreign Affairs Network, is the department's instance of Google Apps for Government, and some of the sections have preferred this for its collaborative features, its ease of use, and its ability to create quizzes and surveys and Google forms. So the flagship section that's using FAN right now is our Spanish section, which is one of our largest language sections-- in fact, possibly the largest-- which is using FAN to deliver the Spanish curriculum to all of its students.

The rest of the language sections use the eHomerooms during non-instructional week. During

New Year's, between Christmas and New Year's every year, we don't offer classes at SLS-- this is the one time of year this happens-- so students who would like to do a full time independent study during this week use the eHomerooms for that purpose. They will get assignments from their teachers off of the eHomerooms and then submit them through the course assignments dropbox for the teacher to review. And during that week, students aren't actually here, they are off-site.

So for distance learning students, the LMS is a key part of the course delivery. Students may do activities that are part of a CBT course-- some of those are the courses that Mark and Robert have referenced-- or they may use materials that are provided by a teacher that are updated more frequently to reflect current events. Teachers meet with students virtually through web conferencing that is external to the LMS, and then the mentors use the eHomerooms to post course information and schedules. They also use it to track attendance, schedule virtual meetings, assign homework, track progress, and provide feedback to students.

So, the next slide. Excuse me.

So the future. So School of Language Studies believes that the right LMS can be a key part of our training ecosystem. For our on-campus students, an LMS could provide a way for them to learn the language anywhere at any time-- whether that's at the FSI cafeteria, or the Starbucks down the street. For our distance-learning students, the LMS is already a large part of those courses. However, some critical areas [INAUDIBLE] under-served, leaving us with a patchwork system, now. An LMS that is more tailored to the nature of our online courses will enhance our ability to serve that population.

So David asked me to specify which requirements are the key ones for SLS, and of course the easy answer is all of them. So anything in the SOO, we want it, right? Because the nature of technology is that it's always changing, and so what's critical today will be taken over by a need that hasn't even been identified yet. But that being said, we can, in the big picture, group SLS needs into five major categories.

And so the first one, no surprise, is to support scripts for foreign languages. We teach approximately 70 languages. Many of them don't use the Latin alphabet. They use complex scripts, including Arabic, Chinese, Cyrillic, Thai, and Georgian-- and that's just to name a

11 | P a g e handful. Our LMS must support all of them, and they must support them in culturally-relevant formats.

Let me give you an example that illustrates this-- Urdu. Urdu is spoken in Pakistan. It's written in an Arabic script-- font. And most Arabic script languages are written in a linear style, called naskh. That's what you see when you see typical Arabic. Urdu is often written in a more flowing style, called nastaliq, and that is what we teach students here at FSI because that's what is most culturally relevant.

So I've worked with a lot of software over the past couple of decades, and many of them cannot support nastaliq, but many of them can, including Microsoft Word, and so any LMS that we buy has to be able to support these type of fonts and other issues. This example is just an example of one of the challenges that foreign scripts pose, including left-to-right reading order, vowels that stack, traditional versus simplified Chinese characters-- the list goes on.

So we need something that can support foreign languages in all the permutations that we need.

So another requirement that we have is the LMS has to be extensible. We need a system that can grow and change as we grow and change. We need an LMS that will let us integrate third-party technologies as they become available, and let us change those out for new technologies as new options are developed, and new needs are identified.

We also need a system that is user-centered. We need simple, easy-to-use interfaces for students, teachers, and content developers. Instructors and students don't have time to learn a system that is hard to use, and that's not to say that the LMS shouldn't do complex things-- it absolutely should-- but it should allow for them in a way that is easy for people to use and understand. A lot of user error today comes from the fact that many interfaces just aren't well-designed from the user perspective.

So our next requirement are systems that are media-rich. Of course we wanted a system that does synchronous and asynchronous learning, but beyond that, and even more important, is an LMS that allows for a lot of media and a lot of types. So language training is all about speaking, reading, and listening.

For speaking, we need videoconferencing accessible through the LMS. We also need asynchronous voice recording so a student can record themselves upload it for the teacher review later. We need interactive whiteboards so that a teacher can show in real time to their students how to spell a word. We need the ability for teachers and students to upload and share large video files in a variety of formats and from a variety of devices, including mobile devices, desktop, iOS, Android, you name it. We need support for ePub and other ebook formats.

And the last requirement-- keep in mind we want everything else too-- but we also have a need for complex assessments. So assessing progress in language learning can be complicated, and of course we use quizzes-- just like anybody else does-- but our needs for assessment extend beyond multiple choice and true/false tests. Ultimately our goal is to help our students become proficient in the language, and this means that we are most interested in assessments that

12 | P a g e measure how well students can speak fluently and knowledgeably, follow a conversation, or read a document in the target language.

Our assessments involve reading and speaking and so we need complex assessments that can incorporate things like audio and video, modeled answers, and have the ability to add in voice recognition and machine translation, as those technologies become available. So that's a brief survey of what we're looking for in LMS, and with that, I'll turn it over to Craig Hayden.

MR. ETHERTON: Before we move on, I just wanted to make one note. I see a lot of folks here that are holding up their cell phones, taking pictures of the slides. These slides will be available to everyone-- we'll be publishing it on the FedBizOpps site. So, thank you.

And to you, Craig.

MR. CRAIG HAYDEN: Thank you, Tiffany. Tiffany just identified a number of needs and requirements that I think you'll hear a lot of, today, and I think there's a lot of common thread to

SLS's needs that are apparent in the other schools here at FSI.

I'm here today to talk about how the School of Professional Area Studies, or as we call it here, SPAS-- it's a great acronym-- how SPAS uses its LMS, and what it needs for the future. So the user story for SPAS is similar, but not entirely the same to what the School of Language Studies has for its LMS. SPAS provides focused training, enabling professionals to fulfill the requirements of their onward assignments. SPAS courses cultivate skills and knowledge at both the task specific and job specific level, as well as facilitates a professional development across all categories of Foreign Service professionals. So SPAS offers over 470 courses, both online and in the classroom, to professionals working domestically, and for those outposts all around the world. SPAS courses are offered through divisions-- and there are a number of divisions in

SPAS-- which roughly align to the professional, or as we call here at the State Department, the

Conal Tracks for Foreign Service Officers and supporting staff.

So, as you can see on the slide, we have divisions that offer courses for management professionals, consular professionals, political officers and economic officers, office support staff to office management courses, as well as-- we also have here in SPAS a unit dedicated to developing case study content, called the Center for the Study and Conduct of Diplomacy, and a-

- SPAS has a robust curriculum and staff support division, which aims to improve instruction and learning outcomes. It also trains instructional staff on educational technology and platforms like the LMS.

So next slide, please.

At present, the user story for the LMS and SPAS is somewhat complicated. SPAS training divisions, generally speaking, do not fully take advantage of the functions-- the many functions that you've heard talked about earlier today by our colleagues-- and the capabilities of the existing learning management system and what it currently offers.

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When it is used, it is often used as a content resource for static content-- links, PDFs, other readings, and forms. The LearnCenter also provides-- it should be noted-- access for SPAS's students to distance learning courses taken around the world. But I think I want to focus more here today on the virtual learning environments and course pages that LMS currently supports and what it could support in the future.

So the story of the LMS is one of under-utilization. SharePoint is the most common alternative to providing content to students at FSI, because editing and content creation is why-- is relatively cumbersome, given the current system. It's rarely used. SPAS courses, perhaps as a consequence, also use a variety of third-party apps for evaluation and assessment, for document storage, and other uploaded or linked content, quizzes, polls, et cetera. Virtual learning environments and course pages are not typically used as a significant component or augmentation to the learning experience for either in-person classroom time or online courses, or blended learning course environments.

Now SPAS has investigated the use of badging, gamification, and dashboards for both instructors and students, through a variety of pilot projects. But given the development time and resource implications for these kinds of programs, it is still in the early stages of rolling out courses that might fully take advantage of the functionality and capabilities of what the current

LMS offers.

Next slide, please.

So what do we want to see in a future LMS? Now, we definitely want to see the continued support for the delivery of distance learning courses and modules, developed by our colleagues such as in the ISD division, but I think one of the areas where we would like to see more possibility is in a flexible virtual classroom environment. At any institution, there is a distribution of both regular and, quote unquote, "power users" for an LMS, and for what an LMS can do. But I think what we really want to see is more people taking advantage of what an LMS can provide that's readily usable by instructors-- and in this case, here at FSI, I think, readily usable by instructors who may not be full-time educators or trainers, but maybe here for a rotation of, say, two years, and have to quickly get up to speed with what an LMS can provide. I think, in terms of encapsulating what we want this virtual learning environment to provide is ease of use, to expand the use, to enable more instructors to readily take advantage of what an

LMS can do.

Now, one of the reasons we don't see more utilization is because instructors and divisions currently in SPAS either find the existing system hard to use or difficult to learn in comparison to other available solutions, and, as such, divisions have gotten used to a point where they're simply not aware of what an LMS can provide for a virtual learning environment, and instead use workarounds, so they may be missing out on an important functionality that currently exists, or could exist in a future LMS. So ease of use, again, I think, encapsulates a lot of these requirements. And that-- let me talk a little bit more about that, and this is detailed here on the slide.

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Accessibility. Obviously, we have a variety of different kinds of students, but also students operating around the world on both traditional and mobile platforms. An LMS needs to support these kinds of content delivery and course environments. Collaboration. Tiffany talked about how their courses sometimes rely on how an LMS can enable students working together in different kinds of environments-- you have Google Apps, et cetera. We need some kind of platform that provides this, especially when a lot of Foreign Service professionals are already working in collaborative environments, and need to be able to model that in their course environment.

We need some sort of LMS that enables the tracking of course progress, right-- so either to visualize through a learning pathway or a badging system-- I think this would add to the experience that we currently have in courses offered.

Again, following along with what my colleague said, integrated assessment and evaluation tools, polling, quizzes, assessment. Also, a robust set of communication tools will be ideal. So communicating in different ways between instructors-- and of course, participants-- to be able to push notifications out, reminders for deadlines, et cetera, when assignments are due. Online learning content access-- this means a number of different things, but-- from the ability of instructors to easily put up content online in a virtual learning environment, to having access to content or student assignment work over an extended period of time-- that's readily accessible to be pulled down, perhaps even after a course is completed.

We need functional dashboards, right? Dashboards that provide valuable information for both students to track their progress and to see how they're doing in the course, but for instructors to monitor how students are using resources-- how students are participating or engaging, with the course content or each other. This is consistent with, you know, LMS functionality in contemporary LMSes in the market.

We also would prefer some sort of solution that is single sign-on. Course participants and students are operating around the world, dealing with, you know, a secure online environment for their work. We need something that is workable and not cumbersome, in terms of access.

And finally, because a lot of what we teach deals with content that is sensitive in nature, we need a platform that would allow us to host and deliver what we would call, SBU content.

So that roughly encapsulates the diverse requirements that the SPAS courses have in a sort of short narrative. But like I had said earlier, I think this continues the common thread that my colleague here identified, and I think you're going to hear throughout the remainder of the presentations.

So thank you very much. I'd like to pass it now to my colleague, Sam Fellows.

MR. SAM FELLOWS: Good morning, everybody. So I'm Sam Fellows, and I work with the

Leadership Management School, and in case you were missing the opportunity for a confusing acronym, we are the other LMS, so-- Anyways, we provide leadership training and resources to the department. And typically-- to everybody in the department-- but typically our classroom focus is from the 13 to the SES level. This leaves a lot of space for us to provide resources and

15 | P a g e training to other folks in the department, and so from a technology perspective, our focus has been more on just-in-time training and Microlearning resources, and, like my colleagues, that knowledge and those resources are dispersed over different platforms, so consolidating them in one place would be helpful. Also having the ability to better support some of the services that we offer, such as coaching organizational development, and crisis management training, are also imperative to our success with Learning Management System.

Currently, like I said, a lot of these resources are dispersed. We have a leadership portal where we host a lot of these resources-- next slide, please-- but due to the nature of the portal itself, we are unable to host large resources such as podcasts, and videos, and whatnot, and have found many workarounds for this. So in terms of requirements and needs for us, we really see ourselves as needing a reliable and stable platform. Much like my colleagues, something that a single sign-on- and easy to access. As I mentioned before, a lot of our folks are at a more senior level, and if we blend and integrate that content into our courses, they don't necessarily have the time or ability to reset passwords and ease-of-use is very important, as is SBU information, being able to really host a larger set of content for our learners.

Development would be really helpful to us, being able to have a place where we can develop and experiment with the e-learning resources that we create in an environment which stands away from our production instance. Also the ability to customize that content, and to-- though we will probably follow a template and be locked into that, the ability to go outside of that, if need be, for whatever reason, in the production of our e-learning.

As mentioned before, the ability to host multimedia resources is really important. So I would say extra storage, and less restriction on that would would really benefit us-- as would collaboration tools for our learners, such as, you know, newsfeeds and Q&A-- generic kind of LMS stuff.

Yeah, let's see, what else.

Mobile optimization-- we see ourselves moving in that space as well. And so a system which is already designed to be responsive and can support that, as well as integration with apps would be enormously helpful.

We do a lot of evaluation, as well, in our school, for both classes and for our e-learning products, but also just for the nature of leadership development. So one of the things I had mentioned before was coaching and organizational development. In those situations, we might give out a

Leadership 360 survey to our learners so that they can learn and get a better sense of how others perceive them. Having robust evaluation tools to be able to do things like that-- which I would say are out of the typical scope of educational technology evaluation-- would be helpful, so that sort of flexibility.

Yeah, as mentioned, we're really moving more towards developing just-in-time training and then incorporating that in the classroom. So anything you can do to help us host those resources, and, you know, provide LMS support, would be appreciated. Thank you so much.

MR. BRIAN LAW: Good morning. My name is Brian Law, and I'm with the School of Applied

Information Technology. I'd like to begin by just reiterating that I'm in full agreement with all the

16 | P a g e requirements that you've already heard. So what I would like to do, though, is introduce to you the audience that the School Of Applied Information Technology works with.

So, next slide.

"The Foreign Service Institute's School of Applied Information Technology develops and equips

Department of State's current and next generation IT professionals and department employees--"

So, pause for a second-- the sysadmin community, as well as all the end-users-- so essentially, our reach is every employee in this department.

"--with technology training to navigate our foreign affairs mission in rapidly developing IT environment."

So our audience is internal, it's world-wide, and we have a breadth of topics, and we also have a need to support a depth of topics. We use the-- professionals use it in very much a point of--point of need learning capacity, also like a reference resource, as they're looking up technical information, they might recall that it was embedded in a course or online learning resource that they had completed in the past, and so the ability to refer to-- or go back to-- an online resource would be helpful.

Also compliance education is very important to our audience as well.

Next slide.

So currently we are using the current LMS for supporting commercial learning resources, for example, Skillsoft-- but also we have, in the past, downloaded resources from Microsoft-- and downloaded those into our learning management system so that the completion status could be tracked for that employee. And in the course with e-learning and eHomerooms, as you heard from my colleagues, similar use of those features as well.

Next slide.

So this then then speaks to, kind of, as we look ahead something-- the topics that are important to us going forward. Again, the ability to support commercial learning-- so organizations such as

CompTIA, Cisco, Microsoft-- to the extent that those resources already exist, we'd like to integrate those online resources-- of course, as we have licensing permission to do so-- through the LMS. That would be great.

Of course e-learning, our internally developed e-learning resources, and that definition of e-learning is evolving as technology and capabilities advance, and so again, in complete agreement with my colleagues and their-- their vision for the future of e-learning to include Microlearning.

As well as hosting, of course, classroom learning resources in the same way that, kind of, the eHomerooms functions today, so maintaining that functionality. But also, in addition to those, the ability to track the progress, so I guess this is the, from the standpoint of partial completions

17 | P a g e or tracking Microlearning that is a nontraditional learning format, so the ability that your system would have for us to report against the status on alternative learning, and…