European Maritime Safety Agency

EMSA (European Maritime Safety Agency) is one of the European Union decentralized agencies that carry out technical tasks on behalf of the European Commission and the Member States. EMSA was founded in 2002 and established in Lisbon as a technical body to support in the field of maritime safety and prevention of pollution from ships.

The Agency also provides technical and scientific advice in the continuous process of evaluating the effectiveness of the measures in place, and in the updating and development of new legislation. It also provides support to, and facilitates co-operation between, the Member States and disseminates best practices, providing technical assistance to the European Commission on matters regarding the application and possible amendments to EU legislation.

Among other tasks the Agency works with the European Commission and the Member States on the implementation of Directive 2009/16/EC on port state control (participating in technical working groups of the Paris Memorandum of Understanding, hosting and supporting the development and operation of the supporting information system). EMSA, and in particular its Unit B.2 – Ship Safety, has the long-term objective of broadening training for Port States Control Officers (PSCO) from the Paris MoU region in order to increase the professional competency and maintain a harmonized approach in the whole region.

Improvement of training efficiency should reduce training costs (travel and time) and facilitate the face-to-face meetings, addressing training needs by defining key competency and skill gaps.

Solution

The cooperation started in 2007 when EMSA, through a tender procedure, selected eXact learning solutions (formerly Giunti Labs) with RINA (an operational company created by Registro Italiano Navale, founded in Genova in 1861 and active in the marine sector for ships classification, recognized by the by the Italian Government and by over 70 Flag Administrations) as technical partner and subject matter expert.

The solution required by the tender was the provision of a Learning Management System (LMS) for the delivery of 13 training modules, in these fields of competence:

• Hull and Construction
• Safety Equipment
• Fire Protection and Fire Fighting
• Safety of Navigation and COLREG
• Radio and Communications
• Engine Room
• Security and Civil Liabilities
• Cargoes
• Special Ships
• Marpol Annex I
• Marpol Annex II
• Marpol Annex III
• Marpol Annexes IV – V – VI

Each module has a duration of about 3.5 contact hours. Due to the large amount of content to be packaged in SCORM format, eXact learning solutions proposed the use of eXact Packager authoring tool, with its set of content templates. Along with the production of eLearning content, eXact learning solutions offered its services for the analysis of the technological infrastructure needed.

Achievements

These elements enabled our company to be selected as content provider to cover the educational needs of a population of about 1,000 users (with an average annual growth of 5%). Final users are in fact Port State Control Officers (PSCOs), the inspectors of the port States in charge of verifying compliance through inspection of ships with the international safety regulations, according to the manual and guidelines issued by the Paris Memorandum of Understanding. Users are distributed on the territory of all EU coastal states, Iceland, Norway, Canada, Russian Federation and Croatia, and have presumably no previous experience in eLearning. The eLearning programs will result in significant savings in travel time and cost, since part of the face-to-face training sessions have been replaced by eLearning.