'Plngfests' Help Standardize Online Learning Technology.

The Defense Department administers *appoximately 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 chives 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 rime 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 Oehlerr*, is not just measured in terms of how many people are able to finish a training program. ADL also provides "interoperabiity* 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, executive 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 nor their software meets certain standards, and to determine whether or nor 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 mera-dara 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 mall 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 (FIX) is another program developed at the ADL Co-Lab. Its main sponsor is the Department of Labor. The FIX, 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."