Austrade to move e-learning to the Cloud

Australia’s federal trade development agency, Austrade, will move 130 online courses to a new learning management system (LMS) hosted in the Cloud.

Austrade has a large database of training and learning material which it is looking to move to a service provider outside the agency.

According to Austrade, the new system must be a single integrated solution that incorporates comprehensive learning, performance and career management functionality with social collaboration features. And it must be “externally hosted”.

Austrade follows another federal government agency, the Civil Aviation Safety Authority (CASA), which is doing an e-learning project this year.

A key requirement of the new Cloud e-learning system is the ability to migrate historical data from the “legacy LMS and performance management” system.

The training history consists of about 20,000 records which need to be mapped and imported dynamically so they appear in the user’s training history.

For performance history some 5000 records need to be exported from the legacy system as a PDF and imported as an attached file against user’s profile.

The course files are made up of 130 online courses – from two to 220 megabytes in size.

Late last year Austrade’s global ICT team leader, Janelle Casey, helped promote local IT companies to the Chinese market.

Other requirements of the LMS centre around integration with in-house systems.

The new system must support single sign-on from within the Austrade network which relies on Microsoft’s Active Directory.

“The system must be able to interface with Austrade’s Aurion HRIS system by providing an inbound data feed [csv format] that creates user accounts by importing employee and organisational structure information from Aurion [name, business unit, job role, manager, etc],” According to Austrade.

The new contract is scheduled to begin on July 1.

Follow Rodney Gedda on Twitter: @rodneygedda