Advanced Software Bolsters Distance Learning Program.

• Jurisdiction: United States
• Date: 01 November 2000
• Author: Willingham, Stephen

The Defense Department is taking advantage of the Internet to deliver high-quality online education and training programs inexpensively to U.S. armed services personnel.

The concept, known within the Pentagon as Advanced Distributed Learning (ADL), has strong backing from the administration, as demonstrated by Army Secretary Louis Caldera's decision this summer to commit $600 million to ADL programs over the next six years. This money will help provide soldiers with tuition assistance, textbooks, laptops, printers, academic counseling, and Internet access.

The department took a major step in making ADL a reality in January, when it released new software called the Sharable Courseware Object Reference Model (SCORM).

Previously, the Pentagon had been unable to distribute distance-learning courses because many of the computer systems employed throughout the department were incompatible, officials said.

SCORM will make it possible for those systems to communicate with each other, said Philip Dobbs, an software developer and consultant with the ADL Collaborative Laboratory (Co-Lab) at the Institute for Defense Analyses (IDA) in Alexandria, Va. Dobbs has worked on distance learning concepts for the last 18 years.

"For too long, the technology wasn't coming together fast enough," Dobbs said. "We are trying to provide a leading catalyst role, not reinvent the wheel. But content has to be sharable and interoperable."

Therefore, Dobbs explained, it has been necessary to develop integrated standards that allow different computer systems to communicate with one another.

Dobbs described SCORM as a "best-practices guidebook" that was developed to solve file-sharing problems. For ADL to deliver what it advertises, he said, it is "absolutely essential" to be able to move courseware from one server to another.

Moving Content

When work began on SCORM, Dobbs said, courses couldn't be distributed because there wasn't any common, interfacing software that permitted computer networks to communicate with one another. "If you could move the information, then you couldn't find it when you went to look for it," he said. "There was no search

capability."

The advent of SCORM, Dobbs said, has provided the key to connecting various elements of this network into a reciprocal, exchange service. In this way, the Defense Department is acting as a facilitator for integrating learning software that is being developed by private industry, he said.

The ADL initiative began in November 1997, when the Pentagon joined the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, in an effort to take the latest advances in computer and net-based learning technology and make them available throughout the federal government.

"A number of industry organizations already have initiated distance learning for their employees," said Janet Weisenford, director of the Joint Services ADL Co-Lab, which is located at the Naval Air Warfare Training Center in Orlando, Fla.

The Defense Department has been "playing catch up" in distance learning, "but [it] is starting to lead" in some areas, Weisenford said. "What we want to do with ADL is reuse old content by recombining it with new content," she said.

To speed up the process, the department starred the ADL Co-Lab system, Weisenford explained. The Co-Labs were created to coordinate the expertise of government, business and academia and to avoid redundant software development. Each Co-Lab has "core teams [from government, business and academia] to keep up with the explosion in technology," she said...