FSI/EX/REG Online English Language Training

Background The U.S. Department of State's Foreign Service Institute is Federal Government's training institution. It is responsible for providing opportunities for officers and support personnel of the U.S. foreign affairs community to prepare for work as American diplomats and other professions in the advancement of U.S. foreign affairs both domestically and abroad. Under the HR LOB/HRD, FSI has been designated as the preferred eLearning content provider for agencies requiring training content for the foreign affairs community. USAID is one such federal agency making use of these services in their solicitation for commercially-produced online English language services. Many of USAID's staff positions overseas require a certain level of business English. Classroom training was found to be cost prohibitive. Individual USAID missions sought to partner with dozens of different vendors worldwide, resulting in inconsistent training outcomes that were impossible to measure. While USAID regularly hires local staff with a basic understanding of English derived from traditional schooling, such training must be supplemented with business-level training, which includes USAID-specific vocabulary. Objectives On behalf of USAID, the Foreign Service Institute is in search of a language training vendor that provides annual subscriptions for a library of English language instruction and support which can interoperate with the agency's in-house learning management system. This collection should be customizable so as to satisfy most of the basic and mandatory language training required for employees to maintain and enhance those English skills required for many USAID positions. All work performed by the contractor under this Statement of Work (SOW) shall be subject to the technical direction, approval and oversight of FSI's Contracting Officer (CO) and the authorized Contracting Officer's Representative (COR). Requirements This language learning tool should provide on-demand support of various professional tasks performed in English such as composing emails, getting translation support, etc. Features must include graphics, animation, applets, music, video, and audio. It should also include a skills proficiency measurement tool; such assessment tool must have the ability to be administered by USAID staff, not by an outside testing vendor. The program must include an administrative system which allows USAID to assign one "administrator" to oversee the program on a worldwide scale, while concurrently, in-country staff can identify users and monitor usage within their post. Such a structure will allow the administration of a global program that spans over 50 countries and 700 concurrent users. The number of localized interfaces should be sufficient enough to ensure that the majority of USAID's users are able to navigate the service in their native language and must include the following languages at a minimum: Czech, German, French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Chinese, Japanese, Polish, Korean, Russian, and Turkish. USAID has a litany of words and acronyms that are specific to the organization. These words and acronyms are not anything a new hire will have learned about in previous careers, and are especially confusing to non-native English speakers. The system must have a customizable word/acronym program which houses organization-specific vocabulary in a central repository with a global reach. The program should be Windows and Mac compatible. Content should have the flexibility of either being loaded into a proprietary learning management system or being "portalled" through such a system to the provider's site. The system should be able to generate activity reports which provide the following data: - Top Users - Overall User Progress - Summary of User Activity (e.g., active/inactive; usage by language level; new user access)