After exploring a plan to provide continuing education programs for local government treasurers online, Secretary Carlos Dominguez III now wants this program expanded to cover other employees of the Department of Finance (DOF).
Dominguez said the DOF can start with online orientation programs for new employees of the Department and its attached agencies that involve basic courses such as familiarizing themselves with laws, rules and regulations.
“A lot of people are taking online courses. So we should start doing that—online training. Especially if it involves rules and regulations, we can do an online orientation,” Dominguez said during a recent DOF Executive Committee (Execom) meeting.
He directed Undersecretary Gil Beltran to start studying how this can be done using cost-effective approaches such as “thin clients” (lightweight, hard drive-less computers) to minimize costs.
Beltran said the DOF has started videotaping some of the basic courses offered by the Philippine Tax Academy (PTA) to new employees of the Department and its attached agencies, which can be uploaded online.
“I will check how we can do it,” Beltran said during the Execom meeting.
Dominguez came across the idea of online education programs for DOF employees during a recent meeting with top executives of Huawei Philippines.
Selected online courses and classes can be accessed through a private cloud service dedicated to the PTA or the DOF, Dominguez said.
In this way, he said, enrollees can remotely access the online course offerings through their own computers, tablets or smartphones.
Director Angelica Sarmiento, the head of the DOF’s Central Management Information Office (CMIO), said it was possible to come up with this online setup, through “thin clients” used to establish remote connections to the main PTA server.
The Department of Information and Communications Technology (DICT) has partnered with Huawei Philippines to encourage young innovators to come up with ICT solutions meant to empower communities.
According to Beltran, the PTA has already submitted to the DICT its three-year Strategic Information Plan, which includes setting up an information system for the Academy to facilitate knowledge sharing. Beltran oversees the administration of the PTA.
Huawei Philippines officials said the company is ready to offer its information and communications technology (ICT) solutions and organize workshops to assist the DOF and its attached agencies in migrating to an online environment.
The company is also planning to introduce soon to the Philippines its cloud service, which would further boost investor confidence in the economy as it helps reduce costs for businesses in terms of investing in computer hardware and software, according to Long.
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