SAQA says that it is also committed to building the capacity of its own staff members. To further this commitment, SAQA required a long-term IT partner who could deliver object-orientated software platforms to meet its knowledge and learning management requirements.

At the end of last year, SAQA appointed the eDegree and Reusable Objects consortium as its IT partner, focusing on delivery within an open standards environment.

The partnership is aimed at supporting the implementation of the NQF by all stakeholders, and enhancing ongoing capacity building of SAQA staff in line with SAQA's commitment to lifelong learning so that SAQA employees are equipped to design and develop their own e-learning programmes, and can manage the software portals and knowledge management systems delivered by eDegree and Reusable Objects.

According to SAQA, critical to the efficient functioning of any organisation is the effective running of its back office systems, namely, those systems that store information, channel information and allow information to be retrieved by different people at different times.

The partnership between eDegree, Reusable Objects and SAQA is essentially to provide ongoing IT advisory services towards a coherent IT system.

Several projects have already been launched. The first of these is the NQF Gateway (nqf.org.za), which is an open source portal that aims to provide the leadership of the Further Education and Training colleges, SETAs, education and training providers, skills development facilitators and members of the public, with a user-friendly view into information and resources about the NQF.

Says Ntsiki Gumbe, SAQA's manager of the NQF Gateway: The implementation of one user-friendly gateway provides an information interface for people to navigate through the complexities of skills development and legislation in the national qualifications landscape.

The second project is the internally focused portal, the SAQA Community Gateway, which is designed to function as SAQA's intranet, and to provide quick access to internal information, staff resources and integrated IT applications.