Abstract:

The impact of the global economic crisis has forced education, training and development institutions to apply stringent austerity measures while, at the same time, attempting to deliver efficiently and accountably on their mandates. In the South African context, the Public Finance Management Act (No.1 of 1999) obliges state departments to exercise their fiduciary duties, with respect to financial administration and management, prudently. However, various Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) comparative country reports scores South Africa low on efficient resource allocation relative to education, training and development.

This paper reflects on the response of the National School of Government (NSG) in its attempt to provide effective and contextually responsive education and training while being faced with austerity measures on the one hand, and the opportunities that developments in information and communication technologies afford on the other. The NSG is a South African state department mandated to provide training to contribute to the establishment of a professional, accountable, and responsive cadre of public officials. To achieve this objective the School, among other strategies, implements eLearning to reduce learning and development costs, improve flexibility and widen the reach of its education, training and development offerings.

The eLearning unit at the NSG was tasked with the development of an online performance management course, which could be rolled out to scale to public servants who manage their own and team performance. The eLearning solution had to be cost effective in light of austerity measures taken by government to reduce expenditure, yet achieve high levels of professional training. In pursuit of this goal a massive open online course was developed for public officials.

This paper briefly contextualises the public administration education, training and development landscape in, and relative to, South Africa. It then proceeds to explain how available resources were optimally used to design, develop and implement a cost effective eLearning solution to develop capacity in performance management. In addition, the paper reports on the utilisation of Moodle as an Open Source software package to develop and deliver the course. The paper also addresses belief systems that had to be debunked around self-directed online learning in the work place and reports on technical and other lessons learned.

Lessons and information recounted in this paper is based on extant literature, participant observation, learner feedback, anecdotal evidence and system reports. Longitudinal performance management outcomes will be the focus of future papers.

Keywords:

Cost-effective e-learning solutions, open learning, professional development, workplace learning.