OPM re-issues E-Learning solicitation

The Office of Personnel Management late last week re-released the E-Learning solicitation after vendor concerns over the fairness of the procurement forced the agency to pull it back last month.

The new solicitation removes any mention of the incumbent contractors in the statement of work as well as some of the wording that closely resembled one of the incumbent contractor's Web site.

Bids on the new contract are due by Nov. 2, and vendors by Sept. 17 must inform OPM whether they will submit a proposal.

The E-Learning initiative, one of the 25 Quicksilver e-government projects, set up a central portal, GoLearn.gov, for online training. The contract will provide agencies more choices of vendors to provide learning management systems, content, integration services, online degrees and other online learning functions.

The new request for proposals will be similar to the previous one in that vendors still will have to compete for each task order under the contract.

There are seven specialized areas; companies may bid on as few as one area or as many as six areas. Vendors may bid on the seventh area, management service providers, but cannot bid on the other six areas to avoid conflict-of-interest issues, the RFP said.

The solicitation also said GoLearn is working with the General Services Administration's E-Authentication initiative to provide a single-sign-on capability.