USPTO's Intellectual Property E-Learning Initiative

The USPTO embraces the President's initiative to provide increased openness and transparency of government operations through formulation of plans for increased public participation and collaboration, and through solicitation of ideas and expertise of the e-Learning industry participants. The USPTO is considering the development of an outsourcing model for internal and external e-Learning, and is interested in working with vendors and service providers to host and deliver Intellectual Property (IP) and other content to external (public) personnel and internal (USPTO) employees at no cost to the USPTO. Today, the USPTO has authored over 150 different e-Learning - modules with a range of IP topics (Patents, Trademarks, International IP Rights, etc.) and uses a combination of internal systems and external hosting partners to provide this training to our internal users and to external (public) entities. This content ranges from high-quality streaming audio, video and slides to more basic interactive training content consisting of slides with audio. We are constantly developing new training materials to keep our staff and the public current on important IP related matters and have also translated some of our content into other languages (e.g. French, Spanish, Russian, Arabic, etc.) for our International audience. While recent efforts have been primarily focused on an internal audience, we believe there is significant interest in this content from the IP community, where this content could be used to train both current and prospective attorneys, inventors, business owners and other IP practitioners. The scale could be all interested law firms to all worldwide IP offices to 6000 patent examiners or 700 trademark attorneys. However, at this time, the USPTO does not have the technical capability or financial resources to effectively and efficiently distribute its rich, interactive content to this prospective market of users. The USPTO is seeking input/comments from interested parties providing these types of services to commercial organizations or government agencies, on their approach for providing e-Learning for the USPTO and for its interested customers. One of the agency's proposed solutions is to enter into one or more no cost contracts where the vendor(s) will provide an interactive e-Learning environment for the USPTO. As part of any resulting agreement, the vendor(s) will be permitted to maintain, repackage (add value) and distribute the content on a for-fee basis. The vendor(s) will fund the ongoing operation of any technical infrastructure required to operate this environment, including the maintenance of any historical content. The vendor(s) will also provide a flexible e-Learning solution that will not only allow for the hosting and distribution of USPTO authored content, but, in the long term, will be a comprehensive e-Learning system for the USPTO. The USPTO is seeking written responses from interested parties on the feasibility of this approach to address the agency's goal to improve its e-Learning capabilities. The written responses may include other alternatives for USPTO consideration.