Federal Courts want cloud-based training platform

The Federal Court System wants to set up a commercial cloud-based learning management system (LMS) that tens of thousands of court employees across the county could access for training and other applications.

The Procurement Office of the United States Courts issued an April 11 request for information regarding a subscription service that could host users from the gamut of federal appellate and trial courts, as well as the Administrative Office of the United States Courts, Federal Judicial Center and U.S. Sentencing Commission. The system, said the filing, would serve 20,000 subscribers.

The new system, to be hosted in a cloud environment certified by the Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program, will replace the legacy LMS that supports human resources' education programs. The existing content and applications must be migrated to the new platform, and the procurement office wants the updated system to be able to send and receive data to and from third-party content providers and commercial learning content management systems such as Skillsoft and Blackboard.

The new system, it said, will allow managers to create, display and edit curricula and set learning paths, plans and programs for various user roles. It should also give “learners” more self-service options, including self-registration, waitlist selection and course dropping.

The cloud-based LMS must also provide flexible privileges allowing administrators in the various court environments to manage their own domains and domain views, as well as allow multiple configurations of course catalogs, including those from the old system, complete with their old course numbers, names and descriptions, the RFI said.

The new systems should allow supervisory-level views of employee records to approve training requests, as well as related analytics.

Responses are due April 30.