The Defense Department administers approximately 30,000 training
courses per year to address the needs of its 2.5 million personnel.
It costs about $15 billion annually to maintain and operate military
training installations.
In light of growing needs to provide both basic and advanced training,
Pentagon officials in recent years have been working on ways to
make education less costly and more efficient.
One of the most high-profile initiatives is called Advanced Distributed
Learning. ADL is a collaborative effort to digitize the training
environment by making training courses available online.
The ADL initiative was endorsed by the White House in 1997, and
in 1999, President Clinton created a federal training technology
task force.
After the technology task force delivered its strategic plan to
Congress in 1999, the ADL was funded through the fiscal year 2000
Defense Department Authorization Act. It is managed by the Office
of the Secretary of Defense, with additional funding provided through
the National Guard and the Department of Labor.
Using the Internet as a vehicle for bringing training to the troops
drives down the costs significantly, according to Mark Oehlert,
ADL’s deputy communications director. If a course can be provided
online, rather than at fixed classrooms, the government entity will
save costs on travel, in addition to reducing the amount of time
the employee must be out of the office. ADL program officials claim
that this technology reduces the cost of instruction by about one
third. For example, with a traditional training program, federal
employees spend nine days in class, with two days set aside for
travel. A Web-based training class can reduce the time spent in
training to 25 online hours.
Oehlert explained that the value of distributed learning grows
as more courses are added to the network. This is known as the “law
of increasing returns,” an idea coined by Kevin Kelly, the
senior editor of Wired Magazine. “A network of one is worth
almost nothing,” said Oehlert. “But a network of a million
is worth much more than the sum of its parts.”
With traditional training sessions, about 3,700 federal government
employees have graduated annually from various programs. But with
the availability of more courses on line, by fiscal year 2000, 8,750
had graduated from online programs in that year.
The success of ADL, said Oehlert, is not just measured in terms
of how many people are able to finish a training program. ADL also
provides “interoperability tools,” he said, so government
workers can “leverage the work of others.”
The ADL vision is “to provide access to the highest quality
education and training, tailored to individual needs, delivered
cost-effectively, anywhere and anytime,” Oehlert said. He
argued that, on average, a tutored student learns more than 98 percent
of classroom students. “Online training provides the kind
of one-on-one experience that is comparable with a tutoring experience,”
he said.
“What is desired, in terms of the ADL initiative and the
follow-on infrastructure that will be developed, is that courseware
(training and educational information) on the Web can be interchangeable,
mined and harvested,” said retired Navy Rear Adm. Fred Lewis,
exe-cutive director of the National Training Systems Association.
ADL’s strategy is to take advantage of existing network-based
technologies with a common framework to create platform neutral,
reusable courseware and content.
Bob Glennon, senior program manager for interactive media instruction
and distance learning programs at Link Simulation and Training in
Herndon, Va., explained how the advent of new standards for Web-based
training is changing the landscape of government training. “Customers,
for the past 15 years or so, have been developing Web-based training
for their own organizations. Reusability has been limited at best.
Even though equipment might be identical, there was a lack of standards
across the Defense Department,” said Glennon. “The promise
of ADL is that there will be orders of magnitude across the Defense
Department to cross-utilize the coursework that is developed.”
The courseware, according to Oehlert, encompasses “a broad
range of technical and decision-making skills for both individuals
and teams.”
The ADL Co-Laboratory (called a “co”-laboratory, because
it is a laboratory that functions primarily on collaboration), is
based in Alexandria, Va., with additional locations in Florida and
Wisconsin.
“One of the main goals of the Co-Lab is to bring together
those who set standards, those who develop software in academic
environments, and representatives from industry who produce the
software,” said Lewis. “It is better to do this in a
collaborative environment than to have the government set the standards
is isolation, without being able to determine whether those standards
are realistic and achievable.”
The Co-Lab has developed a downloadable Web-based program to make
training information more accessible. The program is called the
Sharable Content Object Reference Model, known to industry as SCORM.
The creation of SCORM was a collaborative process between a core
management team, a technical team, Defense Department sponsors,
visiting project managers from the Defense Department, other federal
agencies, industry, academia and international partners.
SCORM continues to be developed and improved, officials said. Vendors
and content developers have met several times, to test and demonstrate
the interoperability of SCORM and related programs. Representatives
from more than 100 organizations and private companies that do training
business with the federal government attend these professional gatherings,
known as “Plugfests.”
Plugfests seek to test the compatibility of the learning software
in real time. Participants, in the past, have included companies
large and small, from Microsoft and Oracle, to Blackboard Inc.,
Link Simulation and Training and JHT Multimedia.
“A Plugfest is basically an opportunity for developers of
educational software to determine whether or not their software
meets certain standards, and to determine whether or not it will
interact seamlessly with distributed learning systems overall,”
said Lewis.
“There’s a lot of pre-work that you need to do before
you go to the Plugfest, because if you just start running your LMS
[learning management systems] when you get there, you are likely
to have problems,” said Glennon. “The Plugfest benefits
from the synergy of people who have a lot of learning management
systems.”
Tim Kilby, technical director at Link Simulation and Training,
said that Plugfest is a “wonderful opportunity for everyone
who is a stakeholder in ADL, but its also a great opportunity to
test software. It is a competitive environment to make sure each
system is working.”
In October, the ADL Co-Lab released the latest version of SCORM,
version 1.2. The release added the ability to package instructional
material and meta-data for import and export. These XML-based—which
is widely thought to be the next generation of HTML-based Web networking—specifications,
according a Defense Department statement, “provides a crucial
link between learning content repositories and learning management
systems.”
Using SCORM as a standard, the National Guard has developed the
Distributive Training Technology Project (DTTP), an online training
“Internet” for the National Guard, which is currently
in use. The system provides broad access to education, training
and information. The DTTP is building classrooms in 54 states and
U.S. territories. The system will be connected to an increasingly
larger network, providing access for National Guardsmen to extensive
coursework and informational resources.
The classrooms also provide access to two-way audio and video conferencing,
electronic mail and electronic network access, computer-based learning,
video programming, and interactive audio and video technologies.
To date, 251 multi-media classrooms have been installed.
The National Guard is seeking public-private partnerships to help
fund additional classrooms. Officials noted that National Guard
DTTP classrooms also could be used as telecommuting centers, extension
sites for adult education centers, community colleges and universities,
training centers for businesses and trade associations, and for
“town hall meetings.”
According to promotional materials published by the National Guard,
the network can also broaden access to tele-medicine for small and
rural communities. “Via access to the Guard’s network,
a state medical facility can review patient records, including radiology
films, while consulting with physicians at the Center for Disease
Control in Atlanta in real time.
“Citizens in remote communities may ‘visit’ Social
Security or Veteran’s Administration offices without traveling
outside their communities.”
The Federal Learning Exchange (FLX) is another program developed
at the ADL Co-Lab. Its main sponsor is the Department of Labor.
The FLX, according to officials, is a “one-stop training and
education resource tool for the federal government.” There
is no charge for either the government or the public to use the
service, and the FLX basically provides an “‘electronic
yellow pages,’ where agencies list robust information on training
resources for the federal workforce,” officials said. FLX
also links to the Department of Labor’s career development
networks: America’s Job Bank, America’s Talent Bank
and America’s Career InfoNet.
Academia also benefits from the work done by the ADL initiative,
said officials. One ADL Co-Lab that is based in Wisconsin, for example,
is located on the campus on the University of Wisconsin at Madison,
and serves as a conduit for the academic study of distributed learning.
College professors can apply the SCORM standards to teach courses,
Kilby said. This is beneficial, he said, because as a new field,
many customers even in industry don’t fully understand the
intricacies of SCORM.
Kilby said that his work as an industry partner for ADL and SCORM
involves education of clients, because the field has not yet been
cornered by academia. “There are a lot of people who don’t
know about SCORM and how it runs,” he said. For example, Kilby
explained, “We’ve got some requests from government
clients who have asked us to make their software SCORM-compliant.”
But they don’t “fully understand the implications of
what a SCORM conformant application actually is.” One of those
implications is that their software has to be a Web-based application.
“We still have clients who want to run a dual-platform application
that can run from the Web, but also from a CD,” he said. “SCORM
only addresses the distributed, or Web model.”