Microfinance Focus, September 28, 2010: Paris based PlaNet Finance held a conference on September 23 presenting the results of the T2 Teaching Tutoring – Intelligent Agents to customize lifelong learning pathways in the microfinance sector” project funded by the European Union. The conference was marked by the presence of different project partners, namely USGM (Università degli Studi “Guglielmo Marconi”) Rome, UNED (Universidad Nacional de Educación) Spain, MFC (Microfinance Centre) from Poland and PlaNet Finance from France.

T2 Teaching Tutoring project is distance learning tool to address the needs of European Microfinance Institutions will be designed by microfinance practitioners and educational players. It is a two-year project 2008-2010 supported by the European Commission through the Lifelong Learning Programme.

In the conference, representative from USGM outlined the project which implements an online tool for teaching the management of social performance in English, French, Italian and Polish with the tutoring of a virtual agent.

Demonstration of the project’s use which includes six course modules and various verification tools of student progress was also presented. The courses are divided into audio lessons and training exercises. Each of them gives rise to a debriefing by the virtual agent.

Project teachers gave their feedbacks in the face to face phase of the program and recognized the complementarities of the two phases: e-Learning courses and lectures in the presence of the teacher. They suggested areas for improvement.

A research was conducted in 2009 by MFC, UTGM and PlaNet Finance to identify more accurately the major topic of the training for MFIs. Around ten MFIs per country were contacted. It resulted that according to them the topic of this e-training should be on Social Performance Management in Microfinance, i.e. translating your mission into practice.

The course offered under this project includes six modules on topics of introduction to Social Performance Management (SPM), aligning strategy for SPM, strengthening information systems for SPM, aligning management systems to support SPM, quality audit tool for managing social performance (QAT) and Social Performance standards report

The project’s future is still uncertain but the idea is to present the main results to key stakeholders in microfinance to distribute this product later, probably on a free e-Learning base but accompanied by payment for conventional seminars.