By Annie Subactagin-Matto, Director – Monitoring, Evaluation and Reporting, PASAI

The COVID-19 pandemic and resulting travel restrictions presented the world with a significant challenge. We have responded by pivoting and turning this challenge into an opportunity by accelerating our digital transformation program - which includes an investment in educational technology and the adoption of blended learning (online and face-to-face delivery) as a more efficient and sustainable delivery model.

Due to current border and travel restrictions, our short-term focus is on delivering our capability development programmes online using our Learning Management System (LMS). The PASAI LMS was launched by Mr. Ajay Nand (Auditor-General of Fiji and current Chairperson of the PASAI Governing Board) on 26 November 2020, during our 24th Governing Board meeting.

Our Moodle-based LMS is a centralized repository of our capability development material. It provides us with a platform to host our online courses and supplementary material, including an integration of multimedia content such as templates, guides, checklists, videos and articles. It also allows for an interactive element to be built into programme delivery – such as discussion forums, chat groups and online communities of practice.

Our programmes are evaluated to ensure that they are effective and to build in a continuous improvement loop in our programme design and development process. We will use our LMS to monitor and report on our learners’ progress and the effectiveness of our programmes using quizzes, self and peer assessments and in-built analytics and reporting features. Over time, we will be able to program our LMS to track participant progress and align it to a Capability Development Framework. We celebrate learner achievement and progress by issuing certificates and badges to learners through our LMS.

Our short-term focus on online learning increases accessibility to our e-learning material and enables us to widen the scale and reach of our capability development programmes during the response and recovery periods of the COVID-19 pandemic. We are able to re-shape the learning experience of public auditors in the Pacific region by combining formal and informal learning strategies, and providing learners with the option of self-directed learning – accessible any time, any place and at their own pace.

We are in the process of converting our learning material into an e-format to offer through our LMS. We have delivered webinar-style training programmes ‘packaged’ with interactive discussion, supplementary material (such as templates, guides, articles, videos) to translate learning into action. We are following up our online workshops with 1:1 SAI-level coaching sessions to track progress and fully embed learning.

The Secretariat acknowledges the support of our Governing Board and development partners, and extend special thanks to our colleagues in the INTOSAI Development Initiative (IDI) and the AFROSAI-E Secretariat for their support in the initial scoping and development of this project.

What’s next

Stay tuned to read more about the following topics upcoming in our blog series:

• How to effectively collect and monitor data at your SAI.

• SAI Independence.

• Managing staff productivity and well-being in a remote working environment.

We welcome your feedback and look forward to hearing about other priority topic areas of interest to you. Please email: secretariat@pasai.org

The Pacific Association of Supreme Audit Institutions (PASAI) is the official association of supreme audit institutions (SAIs) in the Pacific region, and a regional organisation of INTOSAI and promotes transparent, accountable, effective and efficient use of public sector resources in the Pacific. It contributes to that goal by helping its member SAIs improve the quality of public sector auditing in the Pacific to recognised high standards. Due to the global coronavirus pandemic (COVID19), this has restricted PASAI’s delivery of our programs to our Pacific members and in lieu of this PASAI will be providing a series of blogs on various topics that may help auditors think about some implications to service delivery as a result of COVID19.

For more information about PASAI refer www.pasai.org