As technology has matured and requirements have been more clearly
defined, online learning gradually has gained acceptance in military
training and career-enhancing school programs for service members.
This is good news for the Internet-based education industry, which
oversold the benefits of its products in the early days of the information
age. The much-ballyhooed distance learning technology did not revolutionize
training to the degree that advocates had predicted a decade or
two ago.
The emerging consensus among experts today is that “e-learning”
is opening a whole universe of educational opportunities for government
and military agencies. But without clear guidance and focused management,
these experts caution, distance-learning programs can waste lots
of money and fail to produce tangible results.
Industry studies estimate that the global distance-learning technology
market will exceed $30 billion by 2005. About 6 percent of those
sales are to government customers.
During the past 10 to 15 years, “people have gained a deeper
understanding of what they can build with technology,” said
Howard W. Fletcher, director of business development at IBM Mindspan
Solutions Group, in Cambridge, Mass.
The company develops software tools that are used to create online
universities or in-house corporate training centers.
In the world of online learning, lots of people have learned hard
lessons about what can or cannot be done with technology, Fletcher
noted. “We are learning the things we shouldn’t do with
it.” One obvious conclusion that has emerged in the industry,
he added, is that Internet or computer-based training merely complements—but
cannot replace—classroom-based training. “The classroom
training is always important,” Fletcher said. “The need
for face-to-face interaction is never going to go away.”
The secret to success in this business, he said, is “finding
the right technology and marrying it with the appropriate content.”
Ten or 20 years ago, “people thought e-learning would replace
everything,” he said. “But that has not been the case.”
In many cases, “A lot of the higher-order social-based skills—such
as negotiation skills—require the ability to interact with
people.”
Computer-based training is suitable for specific types of learning.
But when it comes to management training, for example, “There
comes a time when people need to get together and figure out how
to solve problems in real time.”
The easy availability of electronic mail and instant messaging
make it possible for instructors to distribute the course background
material in advance, so that, “When you get together, you
focus on what is really important.”
In the U.S. Army, particularly, there is a brewing debate as to
what courses should be online and, within certain courses, how much
of the content should be posted on the net.
The dilemma confronting the Army is no different than it would
be for any other organization, said Fletcher. The issue is how to
get people to take the e-learning program seriously. The traditional
approach, which assumes that, “if you build it, they will
come,” often does not work.
Fletcher foresees an expansion in the military business associated
with distance learning. Because military units are spread around
the world, the key to growing e-learning programs is the wider use
of wireless communications technology.
“When they get the wireless capability, it will make a huge
difference,” said Fletcher. “Once they are free of the
wires, then it becomes a matter of what type of training they want:
it can be combat simulations, updates to previous training or career
development (degree-earning) courses.”
Contractors that supply software tools and develop content for
distance learning programs are encouraged by the Defense Department’s
push for technical standards. The upshot should be a long-term financial
investment on the government’s part, Fletcher said.
“We are watching the infrastructure build out,” he
said. “I would expect, over time, that the Defense Department
would want to leverage our management training and leader development.”
Some of the programs used in Corporate America today to train executives
are being adopted by the military services, for officer training
and development, said Fletcher. “There is a lot of interest
in management development programs.”
The defense ministries of Australia and Norway, for instance, recently
introduced e-learning courses to teach clerical and administrative
staffs about military technology.
Enthusiasm for e-learning has surged in the Defense Department
since the adoption of an open architecture to standardize the development
of online courses. The technology is known as SCORM (Sharable Content
Object Reference Model).
The SCORM is a collection of specifications adapted from multiple
sources that enables interoperability and reusability of Web-based
content. First released in January 2000, the SCORM frequently is
upgraded, as requirements change.
The main driving force behind SCORM was the need for interoperability,
so the content from different vendors can work together, Fletcher
explained.
“With SCORM, once you have the right technology, then you
can get content from multiple vendors, break it apart and reuse
it in other configurations,” he said. “SCORM has been
a positive development for the industry.”
The technology has its share of detractors, nevertheless. “There
are some instructional design types who think that SCORM is trying
to do too much,” Fletcher said. But, from a consumer point
of view, “it can’t do anything but help the industry.
It gives people some confidence that the investment they make in
content is protected, because it can be reused and will work with
other pieces of content.”
By making sure that the technology they buy is SCORM-compliant,
military purchasers of distance-learning products don’t have
to worry that they are being sold a specific vendor’s proprietary
scheme, which would be incompatible with other Defense Department
systems.
For contractors, meanwhile, “It’s been a big challenge
to make our products interoperable,” Fletcher said.
Another standard used to certify online content is called the AICC,
or the Aviation Industry CBT (computer-based training) Committee.
AICC is an international association of technology-based training
professionals. The AICC develops guidelines for aviation industry
in the development, delivery, and evaluation of computer-based training.
Mechanics and pilots who are AICC-certified can move from job to
job and their employers get assurance that they received the proper
training.
By relying on programs such as SCORM, the Defense Department’s
office of Advanced Distributed Learning hopes to improve the quality
of online courses and weed out useless technology.
“There is a lot of bad content in the market right now,”
said Fletcher.
“You can hire a couple of high school kids and teach them
how to build a computer-based program,” he noted. “The
tools are accessible, so you have a lot of people turning out content
of dubious quality.”
Anyone can “make content that looks very nice, that has a
lot of sizzle to it,” he said. “But customers have been
cautious” about scrutinizing vendors.
“In a nascent market like this, people have to understand
what quality really means,” Fletcher said. “Until now,
there have been no standards. ... There also has been a dearth of
people who do a really good job at reviewing and critiquing content.”
Many companies and government agencies, including the Defense Department,
wasted lots of money buying large libraries of content, under the
assumption that it would only amount to pennies per employee. As
it turned out, however, “only a handful of employees used
the content,” Fletcher said.
“We’ve seen a lot of large companies that got burned
by those purchases,” he said. “It looked really attractive
at first glimpse. ... It seemed like a good idea at the time.”
The lesson that these organizations learned, he said, was that
they need to “make sure you have content that people will
immediately see value in.”