The USDA Risk Management Agency (RMA) supports U.S. agricultural production through
a variety of programs and initiatives. In existence since the Depression, RMA, formerly
known as the Federal Crop Insurance Corporation, was created as a direct result of the
fact that commercial insurance carriers associate a high level of risk with the issuance
of crop insurance. RMA supports a nationwide program that underwrites the policies of
commercial insurance companies and is, therefore, able to provide farmers with the ability
to insure their crops and income, as well as their farms.

In recent years, RMA has broadened the scope of their programs to include a greater level of risk management tools and personnel who have experience in risk assessment and agricultural economics. In addition, RMA carries the added distinction of being partially funded by the premiums paid by farmers, which benefits the federal government through a reduction in the amount of government assistance.

RMA Crop Insurance Program
Recently, RMA and FSA joined in a cooperative effort to provide crop insurance training to FSA employees, in order to comply with a Congressional mandate that states that at least one person in each FSA County Office must receive loss adjustment training that is comparable to what private sector loss adjusters would receive. This will assist RMA in having a more locally based set of "eyes and ears" to identify program compliance issues.

The driving force behind this initiative is to reduce the error rate associated with the insurance claim submission process. These errors typically escalate in scope if the private sector loss adjuster who is making the assessment has not received sufficient training or fails to follow proper loss adjustment procedures. Claim errors may include any of the following examples:

· Incorrect field measurements
· Lack of knowledge of a specific crop, such as whether it is adjusted differently from another crop
· Inability to recognize insurable causes
· Inability to recognize poor farming practices or insect problems
· Fraud, waste, or abuse in the process

Since RMA is regionally based, it does not have the resources to provide an onsite inspection and assessment for every claim. The challenge this creates is that if an RMA representative cannot be immediately dispatched to the field in question, the ability to make a thorough assessment is lost (Example: poor farming practices or fraud can only be assessed through an onsite visit before the crop has been harvested or destroyed). By partnering with FSA, which has personnel servicing every U.S. county, and providing training to these employees, RMA is now in a much better position to assess the accuracy of claims that are submitted and ensure that they are responded to in a timely manner.

Crop Insurance Program - Course Development
RMA selected the mGen Enterprise Learning Management System (LMS) to facilitate the development and delivery of the crop insurance training to FSA employees. This process was expedited by the fact that RMA was already utilizing mGen Enterprise to execute other agency missions, including their Dairy Options Training Program, which delivered online training to dairy farmers across the country. The program development process was divided into two phases. Phase One focused on taking RMA's current loss adjustment manual and turning it into an outline for an interactive online training course. Similar to the Dairy Options Program, RMA wanted to offer the crop insurance training online in order to maximize the time FSA employees had to spend on training as well as minimize the interruption to their daily work schedules. Prior to this initiative, periodic "train the trainer" classroom training had been offered to FSA employees, the majority of whom were County Office Executive Directors. However, this approach was not cost effective or efficient, based on travel costs and a need for keeping the training content current.

Also during Phase One, various Subject Matter Experts (SME's) within RMA and FSA were identified and invited to contribute to the development of the course outline and training materials. Since the SME's were scattered across the U.S., the collaborative features of mGen Enterprise, including Threaded Discussion, Document Sharing, Workflow and Knowledge Communities were used to facilitate communication and documentation during the early stages of program development. The use of the mGen collaborative tools not only kept the project on schedule, they also eliminated the need to incur additional program costs related to travel and document generation.

Phase Two of the program development process concentrated on the actual transformation of the loss adjustment manual to an online course. Using the original text from the loss adjustment manual and the course outline developed during Phase One, the SME's developed their own recommendations and processes for making the course content appealing and informative through text revisions, graphics and photographs, gating, quizzes and other user metrics. During this phase of the development process, the SME's once again used the mGen Enterprise collaborative tools to contribute individually and collectively to this effort.

Crop Insurance Program - Rollout
In September 2003, RMA launched the Crop Insurance Training Program through a staggered state rollout. The order of when each state will receive the program is prioritized based, in part, on the insurance claim error rate (highest to lowest). Once training begins, RMA will put assessment processes into place that measure the success of the program in each state in order to revise or update the program for future state rollouts.

RMA also plans to interact with FSA employees as they engage in training via mGen Enterprise. Program updates, alerts and related information will be available to employees through the mGen Enterprise's News and Information portal. In addition, employees will be encouraged to post questions and comments through the Threaded Discussion module, which will be answered by RMA employees and shared with all course participants. RMA plans to use the
questions, answers and feedback gathered from the training to develop an extensive and searchable repository of FAQ's which will be made available to all RMA and FSA employees before and after they have completed their training.

Once the Crop Insurance Training Program has been completed, RMA will have taught thousands of USDA personnel on effective crop insurance claim practices, with a very probable impact on cost savings and error reduction to the U.S. government and taxpayers.