THE U.S. ARMY’S IMPACT ON THE HISTORY OF DISTANCE EDUCATION Free

One of the most significant events that heralded the Department of Defense’s commitment to distance education was the Advanced Distributed Learning (ADL, 2004) Initiative, which held its kickoff meeting in Washington, DC in 1997. This meeting provided the army and other military services the endorsement that had been lacking relative to implementing distance learning as a means of distributing education and training to the forces. The ADL movement became the voice of change for distance learning, which moved from a primarily paper-based and television delivery format to one that would include the value and benefit of the emerging training technologies, including the Internet. The ADL initiative was undertaken by the Department of Defense, in partnership with the White House Office of Science and Technology (Fletcher & Tobias, 2003). However, just as many people did not know that ARPANET, forerunner to the modern day Internet, grew out of scientific research from the Advanced Research Projects Agency of the Department of Defense, many also did not know that one of the most prominent leaders for modern day technology-based distance education was the Department of Defense (Fletcher & Tobias, 2003).

The concept of distance education was not new to the U.S. armed services. They had for years run large correspondence course programs teaching new skills to service members and civilians, both in the United States and overseas. Resident government courses changed slightly over the years and some of the traditional classroom lecture-based instruction had moved into the form of programmed text. Computers were not nearly as prevalent as they are today, and the military ran print-based programs that enrolled, trained, tested, and documented the education of thousands of service members. The U.S. Army’s correspondence course program has been managed centrally at the U.S. Army Training Support Center (ATSC), Fort Eustis, Virginia, since 1976. At that time, training materials consisted of correspondence courses that were used for additional skill training, cross-training into other specialties, or receiving credit for promotion. This program annually enrolls over 100,000 soldiers and continues to be one of the most successful ways for the army to train the force. Since 1996, the ATSC has provided for online enrollment and testing, and has been working to put most of the course materials online.

As technology began to mature and computers became viewed as something affordable for the masses, new training concepts began to emerge from multiple sources. Terms such as classrooms without walls, distance education/training/learning, distance courseware, or remote instruction were introduced more quickly than the community of users could define the terms and determine application taxonomies. The original concept behind distributed training, as it was initially called, was to put instructional materials that were in printed form onto compact discs which were cheaper to produce, and saved printing, storage, and mailing costs. The original goal of the U.S. Army Training & Doctrine Command, expressed in the early 1990s, was to place up to 50% of resident training into deployed units by the year 2007. The desire to move forward with distance learning was based almost exclusively on saving training dollars. By the late 1980s, military training planners had already adopted the view that it would be cheaper to send instruction to people who could study in their own home than it would be to pay per diem and travel to bring these personnel to a central location. The historical events of the time also described a situation in which the Soviet Union was no longer an all-consuming adversary, the cold war was declared over, and the government budgeters were looking to pay the country’s bills with the windfall expected from defense cutbacks. So while training was still considered important, it was determined that where it did not make fiscal sense to bring people to training, those in charge would turn their focus to taking training to people.

What began as a good idea immediately began to run into a problem of culture endemic to the military organization. It consisted of a general rejection of the fact that students could gain the needed military skills without the necessity of sitting in classrooms and interacting with peers. This sharing of knowledge, experiences, and “war stories” was always deemed critical to providing for fully competent performers. The outcry was severe enough that, in 1992, the Commanding General of the U.S. Army Training & Doctrine Command, General Fred Franks, declared that no resident instructional course would be shortened, and that any introduction of distance learning would be directed solely to improving the training of the reserve force. Talk of savings disappeared and managers quickly realized that the amounts of money once thought savable through shorter resident courses and use of distributed training would not materialize, as General Franks’ decision required a full array of training materials for the resident courses and a complete, but different, set of distance learning materials for the reserve forces. It is important to note that, with the retirement of General Franks and the arrival of General William Hartzog in 1994, this decision was reviewed and the distance education program was again considered as a training alternative for both active and reserve forces. The organizational resistance to change within the military was certainly a lesson learned and one that frequently still hounds the efforts of distance education today, whether locally or overseas. The early question asked within the military was how anyone could set a predetermined goal (50%) concerning how much instruction could be moved from the traditional classroom and placed in some electronic medium where interaction was not assured. Additionally, the 50% figure as a nonresident goal created tremendous angst concerning potential economic losses near those military bases that had long counted on students coming to the communities and spending part of their pay checks. Oddly, while the mil itary planners were looking to distance education as a cost saver, the army school commandants were almost universal in their rejection of distance learning. The results of an informal survey administered by the Office of the Deputy Chief of Staff for Training of the Training & Doctrine Command of the army showed the army school leadership’s concern that distance education was a less-effective way to teach military skills. These results placed military leaders, trainers, educators, and distance learning planners in direct contravention to the Army Long Range Training Plan—1989-2018, which said the army training effort must “reach more students with fewer instructors by using technology; reduce costs through reduced movement of personnel and equipment to training areas/activities; and make the first phase of courses be correspondence or an ‘at duty station’ phase.”

The military initially answered this directive by simply “repackaging” the previously-described correspondence courses. The net result was no viable change in operations, little if any savings, disgruntled learners who felt they had lost touch with their instructor/mentors, and the creation of a bad impression for the first “serious” start to embrace distance learning.

While most good ideas begin as concepts, it takes strong commitment from the senior leadership to see concepts through to fruition. When leaders transfer or retire, those who are not convinced of the soundness of ideas may tend to use that time to work against the changes. It isn’t until an idea reaches the “tipping point” that even the uninformed start to embrace the reason for change and work willingly to investigate the possibilities of the new idea (Rogers, 2003). The lesson learned by the military, and one that can be shared with other communities desiring to adopt rapid expansion into technology supported distance learning programs, was the criticality of consensusbuilding. When the idea of distance learning was introduced to the military, the early planning failures were many, but none more profound than the attempt to take the concept of distance education and move directly to an implementation scenario. Needs and audience analyses were not done, consensus was not built, and decisions were made based more on top-down direction than through measured philosophical shifts on the part of the people who would have to implement the changes being suggested and/or undergo these changes. The evidence of this fact occurred within the U.S. Army when, early in the 1990s, the budget contained $34 million earmarked to fund conversion of training to distance learning. This money was to help send instruction worldwide in the form of CDs or correspondence packages in order to save resident training time and shorten the time a service member would have to be away from a unit and family. By 1993, that distance learning account had been reduced to zero as a new leader who was not committed to distance learning took over and chose to use the money to pay traditional bills. This move killed any semblance of commitment from senior leadership and virtually stopped distance learning advancement until the publication of the first army distance learning plan in 1996 (Department of the Army, 1996). With the retirement of that senior leader, and the added emphasis of commitment from the army chief of staff who approved the 1996 Army Distance Learning Master Plan, the new U.S. Army Training & Doctrine Commanding General shifted the emphasis and strongly advocated distance instruction as the only viable and cost-effective means to train service men and women who were involved in a variety of operations around the world. Time to bring people back to the continental United States for advanced or refresher instruction had shrunk, along with the number of people in the service. Thus, there was the situation of multiple missions, longer and more frequent deployments, and fewer personnel, not to mention the smaller defense budget. These situational factors became paramount in convincing the leadership that distance learning would have to become a training method of choice.

Another major lesson learned early in the distance learning efforts was the one of selecting technologies before developing teaching strategies. Educators and trainers had long known that one teaching style did not fit all learning situations. Now, for the first time, distance education advocates could tout the ability of technology to individualize instructional delivery to the learner; however, the problem now became one of separating what technology could do from what one should do with the technology. Some decision makers became enamored with the technology capabilities and made decisions to buy a certain technology or software and then directed its use by the teaching community. Trying to force fit technology became an issue as the military discovered problems with compatibility, licensing, satellite coverage, and even electrical concerns, as 60-cycle machinery would not work consistently in a 50-cycle European setting. CD-ROM production required weeks of planning and development, but as soon as a teaching point changed, the author was faced with developing a new CD. The initial users of the CD technology began to realize that the technology limited the learner’s exposure to hands-on experiences. They had to hope that cognitive-based examples and rudimentary manipulation of icons would guarantee the transfer of enough knowledge to ensure the ability to perform the task when called on. Of course, many of the early issues have been answered by improved technology along with the advancements that allowed in developing teaching scenarios.

Over time, the military discovered that what one teaches and how one teaches must ensure performance, and only after developing a strategy focusing on teaching tasks to performance should the step of choosing the technology be addressed, taking into consideration issues such as needs assessment, audience analysis, time to train, location of training, learning readiness of the student, learning styles, and even the technological comfort level of the user. The military learned that technology will constantly change, but teaching and training strategies remain relatively stable. The army leaders learned that debate over technologies of choice tended to deal primarily with personal bias, versus empirical cost data and training value. Consequently, over time the distance education movement accepted that a new technology should be entertained only after sufficient research showed that a student learned faster, retained more, or possibly improved in overall ability relative to the task or job.

The growth of instructional technology became so dynamic that senior Pentagon leadership in the mid-1990s began to question whether curriculum was being designed to play on the technology applications. The Department of Defense took months to update the Department of Defense Instruction (DODI 1322.20, June 2000) to provide guidance to ensure course developers were not guilty of using tax payer dollars to produce the same instructional content. This Department of Defense guidance was another good idea, but even with the advantage of online search routines, the sheer volume of instructional material has made searches difficult, and even when you locate a product you can’t be sure if it contains the material you need without additional steps.

While not abandoning the value of the DODI, the army decided to look at the possibilities inherent in the ADL initiative. Out of this initiative came an idea eventually called the Shareable Content Object Reference Module (SCORM). Technology had matured to the point that high-quality multimedia instruction could be produced, but at significant cost. It was common for the corporations bidding on some of the first army courseware under the Army’s multimedia contract to charge in the hundreds of thousands of dollars for complete courses. The SCORM concept grew out of the necessity to save some of these development costs. Where content could be separated into smaller learning modules and those pieces developed according to standards (initially Version 1.0 and now SCORM Version 2004, January 2004), the pieces could then be used in multiple teaching ways much like one pulls from various Power Point briefing slides to assemble different presentations. The reassembly option afforded through SCORM allowed course developers to literally “fill in the instructional blanks” when creating different teaching sequences, and as instructional parts were created for instructional voids, those were stored for other future applications. SCORM Version 1.0 was released in January 2000 and was the initial release of the specifications that supported the Department of Defense’s requirements of accessibility, interoperability, durability, and reusability for Web-based content. SCORM allowed for course “tagging” much like the Dewey decimal system of a traditional library. This tagging provided a means of searching courses based on descriptive data about the course. It also provided a capability to search instructional “chunks,” based on description of the information within the chunk of instruction and independent of a particular course. SCORM 1.0 also provided for data searches of what was called “raw media assets” such as illustrations. SCORM applications allowed material to be discovered and coupled with other material to form learning objects or new lessons. This approach, which gathered speed after 1997 and the first ADL meeting in Washington, was an outgrowth of a 1992 initiative started by the U.S. Army’s Training Support Center.

That early effort described the emerging need for modular content from a view that looked much like a Rubik’s Cube™.

In fact, “Rubik’s Cube” was the anecdotal name for the concept as it was briefed on numerous occasions to Pentagon trainers, starting in 1993. This figure shows the early concept of digitizing army training material and capturing it in a career management field (CMF) database. That database would form the army training digital library (ATDM), which could be queried by way of an inference engine. This engine would ask the questions of what training was required for any specific on-demand situation and produce an anytime, anywhere content output for the deployed force. As the “cube,” represented in the drawing as a complete schoolhouse course or repository, was queried for instructional content to support a worldwide deployment, a combat maneuver training center (CMTC) exercise, or a mobilization training (MOB Tng) requirement, the database would create smaller units of training material, as represented by the smaller and incomplete cubes. Where the smaller knowledge cubes were lacking in complete content, the training community would focus on developing instruction to fill the voids. This forerunner to SCORM was sufficient to brief and explain the reuse concept and, with the subsequent adoption of SCORM standards in many multimedia authoring systems of today, has come a broad range of reuse capability. The original thinking was for multiple organizations to contribute to the knowledge pool based on early research in distance learning suggesting that a lot of military training could be produced by others, especially in areas of computers, medicine, engineering, and similar content that was not necessarily military-specific. This would have produced a content cube in which academia, business, and the military would have contributed, as well as harvested the collective value of the knowledge.

The ADL initiative has been a benefit to the vision of shared curriculum. Since its inception, the ADL initiative has established an ADL network that is headquartered in Alexandria, Virginia (www.adl.org). This network provides for a series of foci relative to training for defense, academia, and workforce development. The academic co-lab, a focal point for academic partnering, is part of the University of Wisconsin system and located in Madison, Wisconsin. The joint co-lab focuses on implementing the ADL initiatives within the U.S. military and is located in Orlando, Florida. The most recent co-lab, the workforce co-lab, is located in Memphis, Tennessee and is a partnership between the FedEx Institute of Technology and the University of Memphis. This co-lab focuses on the large-scale adoption of SCORM by business and industry. International partners in co-lab activities include the United Kingdom, which established an ADL co-lab in 2002, and the Canadian ADL Partnership Lab, which started business in 2004. Both of these labs promote the adoption of global e-learning and shared research on SCORM products. The ADL network is underpinned by an ADL technology center located in Johnstown, Pennsylvania. This center is responsible for the ongoing maintenance of standards and technologies for ADL and SCORM. The ADL movement has certainly been responsible for maturing the SCORM ideas from the humble beginnings of a “Rubik’s Cube” concept to its current state of four separate labs and two international partner labs.

The history of distance education in the US Army has been a bumpy road. Distance education continues to face challenges. The primary challenge remains the one of acceptance. In 1999, the U.S. Department of Education collaborated with the World Bank to look at the strengths and weaknesses of distance learning through a conference called “Competence without Credentials.” One of the challenges put forth in this conference was whether the world of the future would want people who were competent in certain skill sets, or whether the future would still belong to those who had the credentials of a degree from a recognized institution of higher learning. People questioned then, as they do now, whether the distance education experience is as valuable as the resident one. Traditionalists question if stu dents can learn as much if not surrounded by the climate of the traditional classroom, filled with students holding divergent opinions, and a mentor/teacher to lead them through a Socratic experience as they search for intellectual truth. When the army started on its journey which eventually resulted in much broader acceptance of distance learning, it balked at the thought that any remote educational experience could in any way equal the traditional classroom, even though the data demonstrated a one third saving in time, and an equal or better performance on end-of-course testing (Fletcher, 1995). However, even in the light of convincing data, there is still the proclivity toward traditional instruction across academia, business, and the government. People tend to gravitate toward those things with which they are familiar or comfortable, and traditional instruction is no exception.

Figure 2 demonstrates an early attempt to explain to military officials how a blended course (the integration of traditional and distance education) might work.

This carefully-designed puzzle dealt with a fictional occupational specialty, 99X30. The horizontal line of puzzle parts described pieces of a traditional course. The vertical optional inserts were designed to show that a distance learning component could be substituted and the flow of the horizontal puzzle would not be corrupted. This drawing is just slightly over 10 years old, but you can readily see that the distance learning technologies considered for integration were only as advanced as computer-based training (CD-ROM at the time). Still, with the virtual assurance from course developers and training managers that instruction could be accomplished to standard, albeit through a variety of methods and media, the decision was made not to pursue distance education at the time. There was a certain fear of the unknown and that fear manifested itself in a vote of no confidence in terms of comparing change with the traditional and comfortable ways of delivering instruction.

The history of distance education is really a long history and goes back to correspondence courses, audio and video, and educational television. It is a history of false starts, lessons learned, cultural shifts, parity of esteem and acceptability issues. The Internet has added a capability for delivering knowledge that even the futurists of 25 years ago would not have envisioned. It has created an innovative environment where technology has started to “spin on its own axis,” often irrespective of learning theory and application. If one can think of a technology application, industry seems capable of building the product. We still suffer from a lack of instructional strategies. We still fear the economic impact of closing or underutilizing traditional classrooms, and we remain defiant about the value of most asynchronous learning applications. The history, however, is ripe for the making. In just 15 years since the U.S. Army started asking the questions of how to take learning to the student, we now have the technological capability to bring just in time, anywhere, anytime learning to any student who can access a computer or personal digital assistant.

The new challenge, now that we can bring knowledge to people, will be that of learning how to request the right information and sift and sort good information from bad. The future should certainly be one in which academia, business, and the government work more closely to manage the virtually unlimited power of distance education.