BIPA’s Senior Director of Basic Development and Creative Learning Mohammed Al-Saba’a stated that; based on the agreement by the directors of all Institutes of Public Administration and Management Development for the need to broadly put into practice the e-training, BIPA’s held joint e-program for the GCC employees entitled “Development of Administrative Improvement Skills”, pointing out that after providing the necessary tools and methodology, 453 trainees were nominated from various GCC countries, in addition to the trainees of the Secretariat, the Distance-Training Committee sought to provide BIPA’s e-training environment for the practice by trainees of the GCC countries in this experimentation, which lasted two months and resulted in 318 trainees passing the program.
Mr. Al-Saba’a stated – during chairing the Bahraini delegation in the meetings of the Distance-Training Committee of the institutes of public administration in GCC countries last week – that “BIPA” has prepared a study on the feasibility of e-training; and the most featured recommendation of the study was to make the e-course available for GCC trainees to include larger numbers by uploading it in the system appertaining to each country, and the study called for the adoption of the development proposals pertaining to improving the e-course which learned from the views and opinions of the trainees. The study also recommended the adoption of e-training hours as part of the training programs and courses accredited by the Institutes of Public Administration and Management Development.
Mr. Al-Saba’a added; the study also recommended organizing specialized joint workshops in the field of building e-content, managing e-learning systems and support mechanisms necessary for trainees, in addition to organizing a conference related to discussing the successful international experiences and practices of e-training, the study also adopted producing joint training packages to be made available to the rest of the countries, similar to the current experiment after agreeing on selecting training packages of common priority.
Mr. Al-Saba’a highlighted the need for planning for acquiring international accreditation for the e-courses produced locally, and working to derive scientific search papers about the current experiences of the GCC countries; to be presented in conferences and published in scientific journals, as well as producing joint educational clips to be made available to the rest of the GCC countries, not to mention supporting the trend towards exchanging experiences through field visits of the teams between GCC countries.
Mr. Al-Saba’a clarified that meeting training interests and requests for the public sector employees in every country is one of the major challenges faced by institutes under the institutes’ limited capacity despite spatial expansions initiatives and raising the level of the budget, yet the requests for training far outweigh the available capabilities, therefore, this study represents a position to get to know the feasibility of investment in e-training projects, which is a phase that must be built on precise scientific grounds to protect public money, and the importance of studying the feasibility of e-training can be shortened; that investment in e-training is considered a sober investment for information technology, also e-training contributes to limit some of the obstacles to hiring employees and acquiring skills to upgrade their functional duties.
It is worth mentioning that the study aimed also to measure the degree of trainees’ satisfaction regarding the e-content and e-system used to provide e-training, and the trainees’ satisfaction about the support, assistance and guidance pertaining to presenting the course. The experience reached positive results related to all themes, where the degree of satisfaction of trainees for e-content in general reached (4.25) out of (5), in another terms means “complete approval”, moreover the value of the standard deviation reached (0.71) degree, which refers to the lack of significant variation between members of the study.