FEATURE ARTICLE

February 2006

'MarineNet' Reaches Out to Deployed Troops

By Grace Jean

Quantico, Va.—The Marine Corps is taking advantage of distance learning technologies to provide training and educational opportunities to troops here and in the Middle East.

The strain of current operations often curtails the Marines´ ability to go through traditional training drills before they deploy. To help solve the problem, the Corps created a distance learning enterprise network called MarineNet, which delivers electronic courseware and interactive multimedia instruction to Marines around the globe.

“We’ve always had the capacity to do it, but there wasn’t a lot of interest, or, I would say, there wasn’t a requirement for this,” said Terrence Kerrigan, director of the Marine Corps College of Continuing Education, which manages the eight-year-old distance learning enterprise.

Kerrigan and his staff usually meet with Marine commanders every April to discuss new training requirements, but they have short-circuited their system to facilitate the speedy development of online courses for deployed troops. Among the courses that are most needed are those focused on countering improvised explosive devices, advanced marksmanship, convoy operations and combat life-saving.

Before the war, when leaders identified a requirement, the usual response would be that the team could do it, but that it might take “x” number of months or it might take a year to develop a distance learning course, said Kerrigan. Today, the Corps needs such training requirements fulfilled in weeks and months.

“That’s very difficult in any venue, to try to keep up and train. It puts additional challenge on distance learning because of the time it takes to develop it. So in some of those cases, actually, we’re out of the interactive multimedia business and more into capturing by video,” said Kerrigan.

For example, when a requirement for culture and language training arose in theater in the Middle East, the Corps took an expert who had given such lectures to various units and videotaped his briefings in a studio at Quantico. Within 10 days, developers merged up the lectures with PowerPoint presentations and put it all up on MarineNet for users to view.

MarineNet was piloted in 1998 and went into full operation in 2000 with six course offerings. Today it is Internet-accessible and offers 1,600 courses that are free to active and reserve Marines, their spouses and dependents, as well as other military services. Anyone in the Defense Enrollment Eligibility Reporting System (DEERS) database can access the electronic courses, using their social security number and date of birth for authentication, said Lt. Col. Larry E. Smith, head of the courseware development department.

The network is similar to that of Army e-Learning, a distance learning program which is accessed through that service’s web portal, Army Knowledge Online. However, MarineNet is designed to reach a larger user base that extends beyond the Corps.

“Somebody thought, ‘why don’t we connect regular Marines, reserve Marines, retired Marines, family members, and for that matter, other services, because they’ve got an ID card.’ They can access our stuff. It’s just a difference of philosophy,” said Kerrigan.

For that reason, all of the courseware is unclassified.

Access is based on courses the Corps has developed, said Smith. “For example, we don’t necessarily think spouses are going to want to take courses on machine guns. They’re more interested in what we call the spouses learning series”— courses that range from dealing with the stress of deployment to building resumes, said Smith.

But unlike some of the other services’ portals that cater specifically to each individual war-fighter’s needs, the taxonomy of MarineNet doesn’t restrict an infantry Marine from looking at course offerings outside of his specialty, he added.

Enrollment for 2005 in electronic courses exceeded 260,000, said Steve A. Brown, director of customer outreach for CCE.

Based on a THINQ Learning Solutions Inc. learning management system, MarineNet is hosted on two servers that are located in a network operations center in St. Inigoes, Md. Users can access the system via the Internet. However, if someone logs in from a military post, the servers reroute the connection through that base’s content delivery engine, which makes it easier to access the information, said Smith.

The Navy originated the first version of the system and purchased multiple licenses for commercial SkillSoft courseware, which include computer information technology courses. The Marine Corps tailored the Navy system to its needs. It has developed 600 of its own courses through a team of seven instructional designers and a prime contractor, L-3 Communications. Still other distance learning products have been obtained from sister services, said Smith.

“If you were to look at one of their interactive media products, you would see they are probably a whole different interface,” said Kerrigan. But many times the Corps will post it as it is on MarineNet.

“We feel it’s more important to get the training out to the Marine than it is to change the color of the cammies and make it a Marine instead of a soldier,” said Smith. “If it’s something we developed that we can change, we’ll take a course and put it into maintenance. Or we’ll go back to the contractor and say, change this type of weapon to this type of weapon,” said Smith.

Marines can access the online courses via any computer or laptop. But for those who don’t have a PC, the Corps has established learning resource centers—a suite of 20 desktop computers—on various bases.

“What we’re hoping for is that instead of just individual Marines going in and taking courses … a Marine corporal can take his squad in to train,” said Smith.

The Corps also has deployable resource centers, consisting of a portable server with a suite of 20 laptops that is capable of operating on its own or plugged into a network. Several centers are currently being used in Iraq and Afghanistan.

“All the places it was envisioned or designed for … it’s all come to fruition,” said Kerrigan. “We’re proud of that.”

The rapid development of MarineNet has impressed many within the service and its future appears bright to those working to enhance its features.

“If you look at the crawl-walk-run stages, I’d say we’re doing a pretty healthy walk right now. As requirements are popping up with training, specifically to go to Iraq and other places, I think that we’re going to break into a really brisk run here with fulfilling our requirements,” said Smith.

MarineNet is getting ready to refresh the SkillSoft courses it offers, said Smith. In the near future, it likely will host the distance portion of the Corps’ language learning needs, along with more cultural briefings, added Kerrigan.

Early on, there was concern that the online courses offered through MarineNet would take the place of schoolhouse instruction.

“We’re not here to do that. We’re here to actually help out instructors, so that they can teach to a more common knowledge [base],” said Smith. That way, Marines will spend less time schooling up in “pre-work” activities and will focus more on the practical applications of what they’ve learned, he added.

Besides satisfying the immediate distance learning needs of deployed Marines, the College of Continuing Education is also retooling the system for career and intermediate level rate officers, said Kerrigan.

The schoolhouses in the Marine Corps only reach out to about 20 percent of that professional military education population. For the past 30 to 40 years, the remaining officers have pursued education requirements via paper correspondence courses. Unsatisfied with those offerings, the CCE, in 1997, hired adjunct faculty to run weekly seminars for those courses. Marines then had a choice: They could continue to complete the correspondence courses on their own, or they could attend the seminars.

With the advent of improved computer technologies, the next step naturally was to incorporate online distance learning into the equation.

“You’ll see that we are moving away from a strictly paper-based correspondence course. We know we can do more than that. How far we’re going to go down the line … we’re on a voyage of discovery here,” said Kerrigan. “I don’t know that we’re going to put everything online. But we are certainly putting a lot more online than what we might have predicted back in 1997.”

By the summer of 2007, the Marine Corps plans to offer online seminar courses with the help of a commercial product called Blackboard, a learning support system that is used by major universities.

“Blackboard allows us to create the environment which we can take students and put them into seminars and have connection. It doesn’t make a difference if you’re on site, in a normal seminar like this, or online, because you’re still going to be connected to the instructor,” said James Van Zummeren, dean of academics for the CCE.

It also would enable instructors to keep course content as up-to-date as possible, while allowing time-constrained Marines the flexibility to complete the coursework at a different pace.

“We think it’s really going to pay off dividends, especially for forces that are forward deployed in a different time zone, perhaps even a different day, from us,” said Kerrigan.

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