Sole Source Justification ELEVATES 06.23.21Redact.pdf

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Our Mission is to promote student achievement and preparation for global competitiveness by fostering educational excellence and ensuring equal access

UNITED STATES DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION

Office of Finance and Operations Contracts and Acquisitions Management

Sole Source Justification

1. Identification of the agency and the contracting activity.

Agency: U.S. Department of Education Contracting Activity: Contracts and Acquisitions Management

2. Nature and/or description of the action being approved.

The purpose of this sole source justification is to provide documentation that explains why this specific requirement is to be awarded as a new firm-fixed price contract to TED-Ed without competition for the ELEVATES (Empowering and Leveraging the Experiences and Voices of America’s Teachers, Educators, and Students) requirement. The period of performance for this contract is 18 months, and the estimated total value of the contract is $3,000,000.

3. A complete description of the supplies and/or services required to meet the agency’s needs.

Project Title: ELEVATES (Empowering and Leveraging the Experiences and Voices of America’s Teachers, Educators, and Students)

Following President Biden's signing the American Rescue Plan into law, the U.S. Department of Education announced plans to provide best practices, guidance, and support to schools as they navigate reopening. These efforts, to include this new contract, are part of Secretary Cardona's priority to support schools, campuses, and students across the country and were outlined in President Biden's Executive Order on Supporting the Reopening and Continuing Operation of Schools and Early Childhood Education Providers.

The purpose of this contract is to surface and elevate the voice of students, families, and educators by recruiting, cultivating, and training up to 500,000 participants to each thoughtfully structure, craft, and record a video story of their unique education-related experiences during the COVID-19 pandemic or as part of the recovery efforts. Some potential deliverables will include high-quality and engaging digital media content (both videos and podcasts), and the identification and dissemination of key learnings, trends, and most noteworthy and replicable takeaways to inform direction of policy, R&D, and general investment by the Department and others.

4. An identification of the statutory authority permitting other than full and open competition.

The procedures in FAR subpart 13.5 were used in accordance with 41 U.S.C. 1901.

5. A demonstration that the proposed contractor’s unique qualifications or the nature of the acquisition requires use of the authority cited.

The Department conducted market research and only TED-Ed had the capacity and capabilities to provide services under all five of the key areas required by the Department, which are explained below.

In order to obtain the goals and objectives of this contract, the Department requires a contractor with demonstrated expertise in all of the following five areas:

(1) Recruiting stakeholder groups, including determining recruitment parameters for identifying and engaging a group of approximately 500,000 educators, students, and parents; leveraging established networks and implementing existing recruitment strategies to recruit a diverse group of participants across key constituencies; and conducting rapid recruitment.

(2) Cultivating and training educators, students, and parents to deliver video stories, including: developing onboarding and training strategies with appropriate evaluation metrics that can be used to onboard participants; and providing impactful training and coaching tailored to the needs of diverse constituency groups which includes modular design and diverse methods of delivery to ensure accessibility and highly engaging pedagogy.

(3) Producing high-quality and engaging digital media content (both videos and podcasts) including: developing and managing a digital media platform to host and engage video content and podcasts; establishing quality and privacy standards for video content that permits tagging videos according to these standards and creating a robust catalogue of content that can be filtered by a range of identified parameters; providing accessible digital media content that is 508 compliant (e.g., captioning of videos); developing digital media content that is openly licensed to enable broad dissemination and sharing;

and collaborating with stakeholders to permit stories created by other organizations to be candidates for inclusion in the body of available stories.

(4) Distributing and promoting high-levels of engagement and viewership, and amplify content reach to achieve targets, including: supporting amplification and engagement with spotlighted stories through the use of a robust social media strategy; establishing aggressive performance goals (e.g., minimum of 1 billion views across the collection in the first year) and tracking and optimizing performance metrics including view count, play rate, engagement, and social sharing; and creating complementary content for top stories that includes follow-up interviews, podcasts (both guest spot episodes on existing podcasts as well as creation of dedicated new podcasts focused on this initiative), live on-stage conferences, and speaking events.

(5) Identifying and disseminating key learnings, trends, and most noteworthy and replicable takeaways from this initiative to inform direction of policy, R&D, and general investment by Department.

TED is a medium-sized 501(c) non-profit organization that includes TED-Ed, a diverse group of educators, animators and technical specialists that provide services to millions of students and teachers throughout the world on a daily basis. TED-Ed serves learners and educators at all socioeconomic categories including underprivileged, middle class and above with emphasis on serving the underserved. Because virtually all of TED-Ed’s educational offerings are free and accessible, any teacher, student or parent with Internet access can use their content and programs for educational enrichment in their classrooms, schools, or homes. TED-Ed also makes a significant portion of its offering available for free on low-to-no bandwidth apps and devices.

TED-Ed has highly technical and extensive knowledge, skills, and experience in all five of the key areas identified above which are required for the success of the ELEVATE initiative as follows:

Key Area 1: Recruiting Stakeholders

With nearly 800,000 educators and 300,000 parents already registered on their award-winning, breakthrough educational website (https://ed.ted.com/), tens of millions of engaged learners already subscribed to their social media channels and newsletters, tens of thousands educational communities (schools, districts, and organizations) already regularly using their talk-training programs -- TED-Ed Student Talks and TED Masterclass for Organizations -- to develop and share their ideas, and over 4 billion views/listens transpiring annually across TED’s overall ecosystem, TED-Ed is uniquely positioned to begin recruiting teachers, educators, parents and students into the ELEVATES Initiative at full scale immediately. TED-Ed has access to both internal and external networks that they would engage to help recruit people into the ELEVATES initiative. In addition to all the people already using TED-Ed, they have access to the internal networks of over 7,000 TEDx Organizers, 30,000 TED Translators, and 4,000 TED Main Stage speakers. Regarding external partnerships, they have the capacity to focus on the tens of thousands of individuals and 100+ educational partners (schools, districts, education organizations) who are already using their core public-speaking training software that will drive this initiative, TED Masterclass. Educational partners already using TED Masterclass include ISTE, ASU, Educolor, Google for Education Certified Innovators, Cast.org, Teach for All, NJ DOE, Baltimore County Public Schools, Georgia Leadership Academy, The Big History Project, and many more.

Key Area 2: Building Stakeholder Storytelling Capacity Through Cultivation, Training and Coaching Leveraging nearly ubiquitous video conferencing software (i.e.: Zoom, Google Meet) and the first three lessons of TED’s celebrated official public speaking course, TED Masterclass, TED-Ed is uniquely positioned to invite the millions of educators, parents, students and educational organization who already engage with their platform to join ELEVATES in a series virtual workshops. These scalable, recurring, workshops can be offered bi-weekly (2021) or weekly (2022), and each can last 60 minutes. Within each workshop one or more highly trained TED-Ed facilitators can guide participants through identifying their best ideas and deciding the topic of their talk. To meet the goals of the ELEVATES Initiative, TED-Ed’s facilitators can encourage participants to focus their talks on communicating innovative educational strategies, tools and solutions that served them well during or before the https://ed.ted.com/ pandemic. On camera, and in the comments, thousands of fresh ideas can be exchanged, and all participants can finish the workshop with both a useful new set of skills and an opportunity to take their budding idea a step further. At the end of each workshop, participants can be invited to continue learning from each other, and learning how to develop their TED-style talk. Specifically, they can be invited into either the TED Masterclass program or the TED-Ed Student Talks program and, if they work at a school or educational organization, they can be invited into TED-Ed’s rapidly-growing Online Educator Community where they can receive extra support in developing their talks. In addition to those invitations, participants can be provided with resources that help them better understand the multitude of high-quality tools and services that TED-Ed, TED, TEDx (and potentially any other participating partners) offer to educators throughout the United States and the world.

TED-Ed has spent years developing and honing speaker-training resources for diverse populations, and successfully serving the education community at a national and global scale.

Key Area 3: Leveraging Proven Infrastructure to Support the Stakeholder-Generated, High- Quality, Accessible, and Publicly Available Digital Media Content (both videos and podcasts)

TED-Ed’s content is accessed by millions of learners on a daily basis, and TED-Ed’s web platform has earned 14 Webby honors since its launch in 2012. TED is also an award-winning podcast producer, with several of its podcasts regularly being ranked among the top-performing in the world. As a media publisher, TED is known for employing top-notch quality standards on every video and podcast that it produces internally. What makes TED unique, however, is that they also train members of the education community how to embrace high-quality standards when they are creating user-generated content as part of TED’s programs. In addition, in terms of accessibility, all TED and TED-Ed videos are professionally transcribed and subtitled. TED has also built a community of 30,000 multi-lingual volunteers who, over time, translate all featured TED content into dozens of languages. Finally, TED stakeholders retain ownership of the videos they create. This enables them to share the videos on their school and personal channels. In addition to retaining the rights to their videos, they also have the option to submit a recording of their talk to TED, in which case they provide TED with a non-exclusive right to feature and promote that recording on any number of TED’s channels. Any videos that get promoted to TED.com are shared with the world under a Creative Commons BY–NC–ND 4.0 International license, and any videos featured on one of TED’s YouTube channels are embed-enabled, meaning they can be easily incorporated into other non-TED websites.

Key Area 4: Establishing Aggressive Performance Goals to Support High-Levels of Engagement and Viewership TED reach includes: TED-Ed YouTube Channels 1, 2, 3 (14mm+ subs); TED-Ed Facebook (7mm+ Follows); TED-Ed Twitter (530k followers); TED-Ed Instagram (450k followers); and TED-Ed Daily/Weekly Newsletters (700k subs). While the ELEVATES initiative would primarily be promoted through TED-Ed’s channels, the greater TED ecosystem, which has a collective reach of over 100 million followers, is uniquely capable of providing broader promotional support. In addition, TED-Ed video content is engaged with over 2 million times a day and has accumulated over 3 billion views to date, and TED podcasts receive over 1 million listens per day.

Key Area 5: Distilling and Disseminating Key Learnings to Advance Education Policy, Research and Development

All talks collected through this initiative would be organized by tags supplied participants and TED-Ed curators. The content would also be searchable and sortable by duration, performance, and several other useful parameters. As patterns emerge in the response from participants, TED-Ed will be able to create playlists that help all consumers of the content understand the collective findings of the overall library in increasingly useful ways over time.

Making a noncompetitive award to TED-Ed is the most advantageous acquisition strategy for meeting the Department's needs. TED-Ed is uniquely positioned to surface and celebrate the voices, insights, stories, and ideas of millions of students, teachers, educators, parents and educational organizations through the ELEVATES initiative. TED-Ed is further uniquely positioned to promote this initiative throughout the greater TED ecosystem, including on TED.com, at the TED conference, within TED’s existing podcasts, and throughout the TEDx and TED Partnership’s networks. For these reasons, a sole source contract to TED-Ed is necessary to ensure the success of the ELEVATES contract.

The below table indicates a Strength Weakness Capability and Opportunities (SWOT) analysis of other potential sole source vendors who responded to the Department’s market research but did not show capacity and capabilities in all of the five key areas.

Table 1: SWOT Analysis Comparing Capabilities

Recruiting

Stakeholders

Building

Stakeholder

Storytelling

Capacity Through

Cultivation, Training and Coaching

Leveraging Proven

Infrastructure to

Support the

Stakeholder-

Generated, High-

Quality, Accessible, and Publicly

Available Digital

Media Content

(both videos and podcasts)

Establishing

Aggressive

Performance Goals to Support High-

Levels of

Engagement and

Viewership

Distilling and

Disseminating Key

Learnings to

Advance Education

Policy, Research and Development

NORC No.

Offeror did not provide recruitment parameters for identifying and engaging a group of approximately

500,000 educators, students, and parents, or identify established networks and existing recruitment strategies to recruit diverse participants. In fact, the Offeror states that they do

“not believe that it is feasible to produce 300-500 videos in three months” so they are unable to meet the requirements of this work requirement. In addition, the offeror lists potential partners but does not provide evidence of established relationships with these potential partners and does not demonstrate work experience for proposed solutions as required in the

RFI. In addition, the offeror states that recruitment will require “paid advertising” which the Department does not support.

The offeror states that "the timing requirements for this scale of a project and completion in the

No.

The offeror did not provide evidence of an established onboarding and training strategy or coaching capacity with appropriate evaluation metrics that can be used to onboard participants. The offeror instead proposes “on-demand videos, webinars, one pagers, and media sheets to coach participants” and

“help desk/customer support” which is not aligned with the

Department’s work requirement as detailed in the RFI.

The Offeror suggests using a third-party platform

(YouTube) but does not provide evidence of work experience in using this platform successfully in the past at the same scope and scale of this work requirement. The offeror does not provide examples of video content and podcasts that have been produced by the offeror, and no evidence provided to demonstrate that this offeror has skill and experience producing accessible digital media content or knowledge of open licenses and experience creating openly licensed digital media. In addition, offeror does not provide examples of past collaborations that have allowed for multiple pathways for inclusion. Offeror recommends using a “third-party solution to streamline video collection” (Gather

Voices) and discusses some of the features and functionalities of the tool but does not provide evidence of actually having successful experience working with this tool.

Further states that

"ample production support" will be

Offeror does not demonstrate knowledge of and experience working in the education sector, a track record of setting and achieving aggressive performance goals, tracking and optimizing performance metrics or creating complementary content for top stories.

propose a process or approach for surfacing and disseminating key learnings, trends, and takeaways.

summer do warrant recruitment concerns" which is not in alignment with the

Department's requirements for this work.

provided, but only includes "a help desk and gentle training on recording, saving, and uploading video".

JacobsEy e

Yes

The offeror proposes an extensive digital marketing strategy for recruiting stakeholders, but all required demonstrated expertise resides in proposed partners and limited evidence of established networks in education. It is not clear if

“promotional incentives” recommended by the offeror would be acceptable to the Department’s

Office of the

General Counsel.

No

The offeror did not an established onboarding and training strategy or coaching capacity with appropriate evaluation metrics that can be used to onboard participants. In fact, the offeror states the following:

“There is no need for a “formal” pedagogical process. We can train everyone by having them watch a 5 minute-10 minute video and the tool they use for the recording is self-explanatory” which confirms that the vendor does not proposes two

(YouTube and iHM) and possibly more

(NFHS,

HurixDigital) as it is not clear in the proposal video and podcast platforms, and provides some information in different locations throughout the proposal on how these platforms have been used in the past by potential partners. However, insufficient evidence is provided to clearly demonstrate the offeror’s skills and experience producing accessible digital media content and

Insufficient evidence of demonstrated knowledge of and experience working in the education sector. Offeror includes information in their proposal for several vendors with evidence of a robust social media presence that could potentially support amplification and engagement for spotlighted stories, but no commitment to working with the offeror is provided which would put the

Department at significant risk.

Insufficient evidence for creating or approach for surfacing and disseminating key understand the critical importance of cultivation and training of storytellers to meet this work requirement.

any knowledge of open licenses and experience creating openly licensed digital media that they may have

(offeror only states that “90% of the videos” on a platform for a potential partner, iHM, are openly licensed).

Insufficient evidence of experience with quality and privacy standards and tagging and content filtering.

complementary content for top

WestEd No.

demonstrate work experience in recruiting the number of stakeholder groups (500,000 educators, students, and parents) required to meet this work requirement. In fact, the offeror recommends that the Department

"scale back expectations for the number of videos required" due to concerns about "equity" that are not explained or justified in any way. In addition, the offeror does not provide evidence of sufficient, established offeror networks that could potentially be leveraged or recruitment strategies to provided general considerations for training storytellers

(access, attention span, retention of message) as well as a few proposed performance targets, but did not provide any evidence of an established onboarding and training strategy or coaching capacity with appropriate evaluation metrics that can be used to onboard participants.

provide sufficient evidence of an established digital media platform that can be leveraged to host and engage with content and examples of video content that have been produced by the offeror

(references “Google for Education” and

“YouTube” but no evidence of the scope or scale of any relevant work is provided). Offeror does not provide any evidence of podcast capacity.

Offeror does not provide any evidence of experience producing accessible digital media content, knowledge of open licenses or experience creating openly licensed digital media, or

Offeror states that they “anticipate contracting with a communications group experienced in messaging large campaigns to diverse audiences” but no further information is provided. Although the offeror does demonstrate knowledge of and experience working in the education sector, they do not demonstrate a track record of setting and achieving aggressive performance goals, tracking and optimizing performance metrics or creating complementary content for top

Yes.

Offeror has demonstrated work experience identifying and disseminating key learnings (California

Analysis for

Learning and

Engagement, COVID Education

Equity Response

Collaborative, Distance

Professional

Learning Program) but does not propose a process or approach for surfacing and disseminating key learnings, trends, and takeaways specific to this work requirement.

recruit a diverse group of participants across key constituencies.

Finally, offeror does not demonstrate capacity required for rapid recruitment to meet the

Department’s work requirement for developing and releasing 3,000 to

5,000 stories by

Fall 2021.

relevant, past collaborations that have allowed for multiple pathways for inclusion.

Reingold No.

experience in recruiting the number of stakeholder groups (500,000 educators, students, and parents) required to meet this work requirement. In addition, the offeror does not provide evidence of sufficient, established offeror networks that could potentially be leveraged or recruitment strategies to recruit a diverse group of participants across key constituencies.

Finally, offeror does not demonstrate capacity required for rapid recruitment to an established onboarding and training strategy with appropriate evaluation metrics that can be used to onboard participants (2020

Census Video

Collection Portal and Training only included “prompts”, “best practices”, “sample videos” and “printable promotional signage”, and does not demonstrate skill and experience in the training and coaching at the scope required to meet this work evidence of an established digital media platform that can be leveraged to host and engage with content and examples of video content that have been produced by the offeror

(proposes using

“YouTube” but does not provide sufficient evidence prior work experience within the scope of or at the scale necessary to meet the

Department’s work required). Offeror does not provide any evidence of podcast capacity.

Offeror does not demonstrate experience producing accessible digital media content, knowledge of open

The offeror does demonstrate knowledge of and experience working in the education sector and provides some evidence of a capacity to develop a robust social media presence that can support amplification and engagement.

However, the offeror does not demonstrate a track record of setting and achieving aggressive performance goals, tracking and optimizing performance metrics including view count, play rate, engagement, and social sharing, or creating complementary content for top stories. The limited information that is provided is not at or approach for surfacing and disseminating key and takeaways."

meet the

Department’s work requirement for developing and releasing 3,000 to

5,000 stories by

Fall 2021.

licenses and experience creating openly licensed digital media or provide sufficient evidence of past collaborations that have allowed for multiple pathways for inclusion.

the same scale and scope as required by the Department to meet this work requirement.

Finally, the offeror does not demonstrate the capacity to rapidly recruit and release the number of stories required by the Department in

Fall 2021.

TED Yes

Offeror clearly demonstrates capacity to recruit educators, students and parents that are

"already registered", "already subscribed" and

"already using" to being work "at full scale immediately" with the target numbers required by the

Department.

Offeror provides clear and extensive evidence of their established onboarding and training strategy for delivering training and coaching for storytellers. TED

Masterclass participants are supported by TED-

Ed facilitators and

Online Educator

Community that provide comprehensive supports and flexible delivery options for meeting the needs of diverse populations.

Evidence of success (metrics) of these strategies and supports provided.

Offeror provided extensive evidence of an established digital media platform (TED-Ed, with rewards listed) and examples of both video content

(TED, TED-Ed, TED-Ed Student

Talks, Ted-Ed

Educator Talks) and podcasts

(Audiocollective) produced by the offeror, which further demonstrates the capacity to release content by the

Department’s Labor

Day 2021 deadline.

All offeror work products (TED and

TED-Ed) are

“professionally transcribed and subtitled” and offeror has developed a community of volunteers to translate content

Offeror extensive knowledge of and demonstrated experience working in the education sector (TED-Ed video content is engaged with over

2 million times a day and has accumulated over 3 billion views to date, and TED podcasts receive over 1 million listens per day). Substantial evidence of a robust social media presence provided that can support amplification and engagement with spotlighted stories

(TED-Ed YouTube

Channels (14mm+ subs), TED-Ed

Facebook (7mm+

Follows), TED-Ed

Twitter (530k followers), TED-Ed

Instagram (450k

Offeror has demonstrated work experience in tagging and categorizing video content and identifying

“patterns” and disseminating key learnings through the creation of playlists.

into multiple languages. Offeror releases videos on their platform under a Creative

Commons BY-NC-

ND 4.0 international license and storytellers retain ownership of the videos that they create. Examples

(ISTE) of past collaborations that allowed for multiple pathways for inclusions provided.

followers), TED-Ed

Daily/Weekly

Newsletters (700k subs). Extensive work experience setting and achieving aggressive performance goals, tracking and optimizing performance metrics including view count, play rate, engagement, and social sharing, and creating complementary content for top stories (TED Radio

Hour, TED-Ed

Weekend, TED-Ed

Educator Talks

Summit, TED-Ed

Student Talk

Groups).

Project

Tomorrow

Offeror did not evidence that demonstrates pre-existing assets, services, knowledge, skills, and experience necessary to carry out a proposed solution for this evidence of an established onboarding and training strategy with appropriate evaluation metrics that can be used to onboard participants.

evidence of an established digital media platform that can be leveraged to host and engage with content and examples of video content that have been produced by the offeror.

Offeror knowledge of the education sector but did not provide sufficient evidence that demonstrates the capacity to meet this requirement.

or approach for surfacing and disseminating key

Eduworks No.

experience in recruiting the number of stakeholder groups (500,000 educators, students, and parents) required to meet this work requirement

(MyAlzheimer’s

Story Platform currently has 500+ videos with plans to max out at

10,000 videos, and number of stakeholders that contributed to

ANGLES project are not provided).

Some evidence of sufficient, established offeror networks that could potentially be leveraged or recruitment strategies to recruit a diverse group of participants across key constituencies, but only in three states

(GA, CA, OR).

Offeror does not demonstrate capacity required for rapid recruitment to meet the

Department’s work requirement for developing and releasing 3,000 to

5,000 stories by

Fall 2021, as the examples provided do not come close to the numbers required by this work requirement.

evidence of an established onboarding and training strategy with appropriate evaluation metrics that can be used to onboard participants

(ANGLES project example provided included a video primer only), and does not demonstrate skill and experience in the training and coaching at the scope required to meet this work evidence of an established digital media platform that can be leveraged to host and engage with content and examples of video content that have been produced by the offeror

(references

“experience with

YouTube and

Vimeo platforms” but no evidence of the scope or scale of any relevant work is provided). Offeror does not provide any evidence of podcast capacity.

Offeror does demonstrate some experience producing accessible digital media content, but states that quality and privacy standards “will be established” but does not provide any evidence of work experience to support any potential capacity in this area. Offeror demonstrates knowledge of open licenses and experience creating openly licensed digital media, and past collaborations but none are in education.

Offeror lists knowledge of the education sector by topic area

(“intelligent tutoring systems, AI-driven dialogue tutors, machine learning-enabled instructional authoring tools”) but does not provide specific examples that demonstrate work experience.

Insufficient evidence provided for a robust social media presence that can support amplification and engagement with spotlighted stories.

Offeror states that they “cannot document

[sufficient] performance metrics”.

Offeror lists that they have the capability to

“employ AI and machine learning to analyze and classify data and to extract and synthesize topics and trends” but does not provide specific examples of work experience that demonstrates the requirement to identify key learnings. No capability for disseminating key learnings, trends and takeaways provided.

6. A description of efforts made to ensure that offers are solicited from as many potential sources as is practicable, including whether a notice was or will be publicized as required by Subpart 5.2 and, if not, which exception under 5.202 apples.

The Department of Education posted an RFI on May 11, 2021 (See #8 below). In accordance with FAR 6.305(d), this justification shall be made publicly available at the GPE (https://www.fbo.gov) and the Department website for 30 days within 14 days after contract award.

7. A determination by the contracting officer that the anticipated cost to the Government will be fair and reasonable.

Any rates proposed by TED for this contract will be compared with labor rates from other contractors in the market to ensure they are fair and reasonable. The Department will perform a price or cost analysis to determine fair and reasonableness of price or cost, as required by the FAR. In addition, the Independent Government Cost Estimate uses historical data to estimate the cost of performance and the Department will use this information in the cost analysis before award. The labor mix will also be confirmed as commensurate with the work required.

8. A description of the market research conducted and the results or a statement of the reason market research was not conducted.

In May 2021, the Department conducted market research to assess viable options for meeting this requirement. This research included releasing a Request for Information corresponding to the five key areas of required expertise described in Section 5. A total of eight vendors responded and were assessed against the five required key areas. This market research confirmed that TED is the only vendor with demonstrated expertise in all five of the key areas required for providing timely and high-quality deliverables for this contract. No other vendor demonstrated sufficient expertise in more than one of the five required key areas. It should also be noted that the Department also posted a Request for Information under GSA and zero vendors responded.

9. Any other fact supporting the use of other than full and open competition.

N/A

10. A listing of the sources, if any, that expressed, in writing, an interest in the acquisition.

No other vendors have expressed an interest in this requirement.

11. A statement of the actions, if any, the agency will take to remove or overcome any barriers that led to restricted consideration before any subsequent acquisition for supplies and services is made.

The Department will continue to conduct thorough market research to gauge the marketplace capabilities for future requirements. CAM will follow up with the Office of Educational Technology in advance of this contract ending to ensure that if any additional work is required, we have enough time to compete a requirement without affecting the mission of the project. In addition, the acquisition team has discussed that at the close of the contract, no further work will require the historical knowledge developed by the incumbent.

Therefore, all future work will be competed.

12. The ordering activity Contracting Officer’s certification that the justification is accurate and complete to the best of the Contracting Officer’s (CO) knowledge.

This justification is accurate and complete to the best of the CO’s knowledge. The award of a sole source contract to TED for the ELEVATES requirement is in the best interest of the Government.

Approved

Pamela Bone, Contracting Officer

Christopher Rosier, Chief of the Contracting Office

Willie Mae Johnson, Procuring Activity Competition Advocate

Program Office Certification:

This is to certify that the data supporting this justification is the responsibility of technical or requirements personnel (e.g., verifying the Government’s minimum needs or schedule requirements or other rationale for other than full and open competition) and which form a basis for the justification have been certified as complete and accurate by the technical or requirements personnel.

Bernadette Adams, Project Manager

Erin McHugh, Program Manager