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OSD READIES NEW POLICY FOR DEVELOPING INTERNET-BASED TRAINING TOOLS
Date: December 8, 2005
A draft policy that would change the Pentagon's rules for creating online educational
content for service members in training is in "final staffing stages" at the Office
of the Secretary of Defense, a source close to the project told Inside the Pentagon
Dec. 6.
The policy would directly affect those in charge of developing courses that can
be taught over the Internet at a variety of times and without depending on involvement
from an instructor, a practice called distributed learning.
Those working on the draft want to establish an "e-learning" standard for these
virtual classes and promote a new computer program, or "reference model," to guide
the production of online course material.
If signed, all learning material created under the draft instruction, "Development,
Management, and Delivery of Distributed Learning," or "Instruction 1322.hh," would
be able to be broken up and reconfigured to make new courses, Paul Jesukiewicz,
one of the program officials in charge of creating the reference model, told ITP
last month.
The effort, part of the Pentagon’s Advanced Distributed Learning initiative, would
reduce the cost and time it takes to produce new material that is similar or identical
to existing course work, he said. It also could change the way technical manuals
are employed in teaching service members to work on aircraft, ships and other platforms.
Distributed learning is a form of e-learning allowing students to work independently
with course content and instructors. The method uses distributed-network resources
or tools such as simulations, interactive games or simple written instructions that
appear on a screen.
The
ADL initiative, headed by the office of the under secretary of
defense for personnel and readiness, kicked off seven years ago after the 1996 Quadrennial
Defense Review found minimal coordination between the services’ online education
efforts. In January 1999, Executive Order 13111 gave the Defense Department -- and
the ADL initiative, in particular -- the lead in creating distributed learning technology
standards for the federal government, Jesukiewicz said.
Under the draft instruction, all distributed learning courses must be compatible
with a computer program called the "Sharable Content Object Reference Model" (SCORM). Further,
training material must be registered under an index that could be accessed and easily
searched by course creators in different parts of DOD, Jesukiewicz said. The function,
first made available last month, would allow educators to see what materials already
exist and which could be pulled out and plugged into a new course, he explained.
ADL officials released the latest version of SCORM in January. It allows users to
interface with learning management systems or online systems used to house varying
distributed learning courses, like Blackboard. Blackboard is widely used by universities
to administer their distributed learning programs.
Once logged in to any SCORM-compliant learning management system, students can be
tracked while they take courses and have their progress measured; the students also
can bookmark their last lesson in case they do not have time to complete a whole
session.
The distributed learning systems used by DOD consist of "granular" bits of information,
otherwise known as objects, that are stripped of context. These objects can then
be strung together to create a course with context and meaning, Jesukiewicz said.
"So instead of one big 20-week course for the Army, it's broken up into smaller
pieces, lessons, module units, all the way down to the raw media assets, pictures
and things like that," he added.
The management systems act as buckets, Jesukiewicz said, holding together different
objects in relevant order. This effort makes learning easier and more efficient
for military students, he said.
The smaller segments allow students to take diagnostic tests to place them at knowledge-relevant
points of their lessons. This is particularly helpful for service members like fighter
pilots who have had extensive training, but may need to brush up on specific material,
Jesukiewicz said. They also track student progress to cater courses, simulations
or activities to the capability of the student, he added.
"If we have someone en route to Afghanistan or Iraq right now, they don't have time
for your 20-hour video tape or 10-week course. They just need to know specific information
on how to complete their task and their task is going to change," Jesukiewicz said.
ADL must also ensure that all material is available to the warfighter whether they
are on a base or in the field.
"We have to make sure our content isn't just sitting in a book somewhere, Jesukiewicz
said. "It has to be digital, small and able to then [be] interoperable. . . . They
maybe on their cell phone" or personal digital assistant, he added.
The registry and the segmented structure of courses make them quicker to assemble,
according to Jesukiewicz. The Army, using ADL, has been working to cut down the
average time it takes to produce a course from two years to one, he added.
In an effort to achieve interoperability for more than 30,000 training courses in
the military, ADL administrators sought to build a reference model that incorporated
emerging standards and practices employed by learning management system users in
academia and the private sector, Michael Freeman, deputy director of the initiative,
told ITP last month.
When the ADL initiative began, the learning management community had no overarching
system of standards, Jesukiewicz said. With DOD resources, ADL officials helped
coordinate efforts to field emerging developments in learning systems technology
through a standardization process which allowed industry, academia and government
to critique and agree upon best practices, he said.
DOD wanted to push standardization so it would not be dependent on entirely proprietary
information that may only be purchased from one source, which could be very costly,
Freeman said.
In an effort to tap into different industries and areas that worked with such distributed
learning systems, ADL created laboratories that worked exclusively with industry,
academia and international groups to harness changes in content management and delivery
technology, Freeman said.
ADL's strategy was never to create learning management systems per se, but instead
use the initiative's resources, which include nearly $16 million in fiscal year
2005, to bring together different parties to develop ideas.
"We have our folks actually sitting in these technical working groups meetings,
arguing over code," Jesukiewicz said.
An example of a standard ADL has helped field and incorporate in SCORM is metadata,
Jesukiewicz said. Metadata, or "data about data," is information that notes the
object’s name, author, and other identifying information, which then allows for
efficient and uniform ways of cataloging and organizing the material, he explained.
Another aspect of the initiative is the ADL registry, a Google-like searchable index
of military distributed learning courses, Jesukiewicz and Freeman said.
Under the draft policy, any training content creator within DOD would be tasked
with first searching the database to see if someone else had a similar course that
could be augmented or broken up for use, Jesukiewicz said.
Also, content creators in one service will have to think about how other services
may use their courses or lessons before they design curricula, he added.
Parts of common chemistry courses like safety lessons for eyewashing should be designed
more generically so that all services may use the same online material and save
time and money, Jesukiewicz said.
"There are cases where there is more context associated with that subject and others
where it's more generic -- the more generic, the more reusable," he said.
Under the draft policy, if a service buys a learning management system from a university
or private vendor, it would not have to go through a certification process, Jesukiewicz
said. Rather, it would instead run a downloadable self-test from the ADL Web site
to see if the desired system meets SCORM interoperability standards, he said.
The Internal Revenue Service, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and
Verizon are some of the organizations already using ADL standards for their e-learning
efforts, Jesukiewicz said.
Another initiative ADL is moving toward may have an impact on major acquisition
programs like the Joint Strike Fighter and Littoral Combat Ship, Freeman said.
Officials working on the initiative are seeking to link SCORM with the international
standard for technical documentation "S1000D."
Thus, when new weapon systems like JSF or LCS are fielded, all the training manuals
will be better integrated with relevant online learning courses, Jesukiewicz said.
In addition, this change will help make it easier to update training manuals and
technical documentation simultaneously, he said. -- Rati Bishnoi
This article has been reprinted with permission form Inside Washington Publishers.
This article is available at the InsideDefense.com Web site at
http://www.insidedefense.com.
© 2006 Inside Washington Publishers
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