A New Online Course to Build Procurement Capacity

Punitha Carlin recently completed a public procurement course. “I thoroughly enjoyed learning,” Carlin, a consultant based in Bangalore, India, said. She was happy to receive the certificate too. She is one of more than 540 certified learners who took the world’s first Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) and blended learning programs for public procurement.

The course was launched in March 2014 and has seen more than 55,000 visitors. More than 4000 people have enrolled for the course. It is regularly accessed by users in 135 countries worldwide. The course has been shaped up as a scalable business model for using information communications technologies (ICTs) in public procurement capacity building.

Public procurement forms 15-20% of countries’ GDP worldwide and is an area which accounts for the largest chunk of government spending every year.

At a time when procurement is getting attention as a strategic tool to bring efficiency in public expenditure management and the specialization growing as one of the top ten highest paying professions in the South Asian region, the portal is instrumental in introducing and mobilizing certification in a previously less recognized field.

“With the launch of www.procurementlearning.org, procurement learning has become affordable and accessible from anywhere,” said Kalesh Kumar, World Bank Team Leader for the project.

The platform has two types of courses: general and professional. Both of these courses can be accessed from anywhere, and cater to different aspects of a procurement professional’s skill sets.

The Certificate in Public Procurement uses a MOOC methodology to enable global participants in understanding the rationale behind public procurement decisions and develop a good overview of the profession and its requirements.

The MOOC portal also offers unique advantages by leveraging partnerships with the Charter for Public Procurement Studies (CPPS) that includes leading public and private educational, training institutes and universities in India.

It’s especially beneficial for in-service staff from the government as it helps save the government’s added cost of training individuals. Moreover, the course can be expanded based on feedback, trends, and training needs in the field.

For those who would like to gain a deeper understanding of India’s public procurement systems, they are able to get a Professional Diploma in Public Procurement from the same website. It is a paid one-year course that uses blended online and offline learning methodologies to impart knowledge of the best practices and decisions in public procurement to participants.

Another indispensable element of the portal is the specially designed MOOC created to impart an extensive understanding and appreciation of the best industrial practices in contract management.

Over time, countries like Afghanistan, Pakistan, Bhutan, and Maldives have been instrumental in taking MOOC enabled learning to their procurement staff and further to the larger community of more than 10 million procurement professionals in South Asia.

What binds the community of partners backing this initiative is their personal involvement in building the course content which has taken over two years in the making.

The portal has won the position of Runners-Up at the 2^nd India CPO Forum Awards 2014 for “Excellence in People Development” as well as the 11^th Manthan Awards for Digital Inclusion for Development (South Asia and Asia Pacific) in the category “e-learning, education and employment” within 6 months of its launch.