Wednesday 13 April 2022
Imagine you need to organise some staff training. But this training is not for your department, or your organisation, or even your country, but for your entire continent. That is the challenge that was facing the African Professionalisation Initiative (API) a couple of years ago.
The African public sector has a severe shortage of professional accountants and auditors. Professional accountants in government have typically only been exposed to private sector theory during their initial professional development. They often lack an understanding of public sector challenges and expectations. So, the challenge was to increase the number of professionals equipped to support accountability, transparency and good governance in the public sector.
One way to achieve this is to strengthen the capacity of those already employed in the public sector. To do this, API set up an “Accelerated Learning” programme to deliver suitable training to public servants in public financial management roles.
With a comprehensive competency framework in place the API decided to establish an online learning platform to deliver training for existing staff. They selected IASeminars as their consulting partner to provide online learning strategic planning and course development.
Now, two years later, the Accelerated Learning Programme is a comprehensive collection of 55 online courses covering 15 major topics including Public Financial Management, Auditing, IPSAS, Ethics and many others.
Reflecting on the process of developing the Accelerated Learning programme API has now produced a report “Ten Lessons” detailing ten important lessons learned.
You can download the full report here.
Of course, IASeminars is proud to have contributed, particularly to lesson 8: Online learning development requires online learning experts.
What has IASeminars learned?
- Our strategy of creating bespoke online learning for specific audiences is highly effective.
At IASeminars we think it is critical to make sure that online courses are tailored to the skills and knowledge of those taking the courses. Often, as with API, the audience has a wide range of prior knowledge and experience. We need to design courses that take account of these varying backgrounds and lead everyone to a common successful outcome.
- Collaboration between subject experts and learning technologists, with both applying their unique expertise, produces high quality, engaging, online learning.
The combination of our extremely knowledgeable Faculty and our very experienced team of instructional designers is very important, but it is enhanced even more when we work with collaborators, such as API, who work closely in terms of both detailed domain knowledge and understanding the audience.
- Establishing flexible and productive processes with a proven record of success leads to efficient and timely creation of courses.
After many years of developing online courses in a wide range of settings our well-defined processes and effective, in-depth templates have smoothly delivered course development procedures.
If you are facing issues similar to those large-scale training requirements of API please get in touch and let’s discuss.
By Charles Duncan, Academic Director, IASeminars