Targeting Blended Training Technology in the U

TARGETING BLENDED TRAINING TECHNOLOGY IN THE U.S. MARINE CORPS

Michael P. Bailey

Ann Reed

U. S. Marine Corps Training and Education Command

ABSTRACT

In this paper we present the dynamics of targeting training technology for U. S. Marine Corps training requirements. We outline the complexity of the problem, both in terms of enforcing the Institution’s priorities, and in terms of selecting from the vast variety of delivery technologies available to us today. We offer significant challenges for future research in instructional system design.

INTRODUCTION

The mission of designing and sponsoring training solutions for the Marine Corps has two implied tasks:

·  determine what training initiatives are most important to the Marine Corps;

·  determine the delivery technologies best suited to address the initiative, given a host of constraints and considerations involving training transfer capability, economics, logistics, and military culture.

In this paper, we discuss the dynamics of performing these two steps within our Service’s context. We discuss developing Service priorities, media selection, the full scope of options for delivery, and how future advances in technology may influence this process.

TARGET SELECTION

Determining the relative importance of a training initiative is a problem we refer to as “targeting.” Using the military metaphor of a Joint Force Air Combat Center (JFACC), we subdivide the selection analysis into two phases, target nomination and target selection. In the target nomination phase, we scrutinize all training technology proposals for the following mandatory characteristics:

1.  it must be of obvious intrinsic training value to the trainee;

2.  it must support accomplishment of training that meets an existing training standard;

3.  the trainee performance must be observable, and ideally measurable;

4.  it must be economical.

If all of these criteria are not met, the idea is excluded from future consideration. The first criterion bears expansion. The acid test of intrinsic value is whether the training enabled by the technology is already executed somewhere in the Marine Corps under Training and Education Command (TECOM) involvement. Put another way, learning experiences will not be initiated only because they are technologically enabled.

Once a list of targets is validated, their relative value is determined based on some simple properties. Good targets...

·  expand the scale of the learning experience by expanding the event’s force structure, making the opposing force (OPFOR) more interactive, making the topic coverage more general, expanding the geography of the experience, or expanding the mix of effects, realistic weapon systems, or realistic scenario vignettes available to the instructor;

·  increase the learning value by compressing the timeline, allowing more repetition, adding after-action review, or making trainee performance measurable;

·  make an event possible by making it more economical;

·  make an experience more available by expanding the locations where it can take place, usually by making the learning experience deployable or distributable.

Based on the two-phased process of target selection, a list of “best” targets is formed without regard to feasibility – this ordered list is a pure requirements statement. The focus then shifts to the assignment of a particular training delivery technology for each target, analogous to assigning weapons to targets. However, the JFACC analogy breaks down in a significant way, as attacking one target often creates positive effects on many others. Often the media selected to address a training need significantly influences the extent of this secondary damage effect, dramatically complicating the selection process. In an organization that emphasizes extreme frugality as well as uniformity, media selection is scrutinized at many levels in our organization.

LEARNING COMMUNITIES

The Marine Corps’ primary learning communities can be delineated in four significant categories, giving rise to four fairly obvious sets of delivery properties...

·  Basic infantry skills are taught to every Marine, enlisted and officer. Tens of thousands are given training in core skills in weapons, land navigation, first aid, orders, and basic tactics.

·  Technical skills (information technologists, mechanics, logisticians, operators of equipment, etc.) are taught in tens of disciplines to hundreds of Marines yearly. Many of these Marines plan to stay in the Marine Corps for more than one enlistment and require sustainment, refresher, and skill progression training.

·  Strategic Corporals, a term coined by former Commandant C. C. Krulak, refers to the thousands of young Marines trained to make high-impact decisions under pressure.

·  Leaders of Marines transfer Marine ethos and military culture. Many of our residential and live training events are designed to include a leadership component, implicit or explicit.

TRADITIONAL MEDIA SELECTION

Media selection, which encompasses matching training technology with training tasks, is a venerable occupation of instructional systems designers. A solid academic overview of the topic is founded in (Pallsen, 1999), as well as an accessible analysis of how these selection methods fair when evaluated by the learner-customers. The principles of any media selection are the same, then and now:

1.  Determine what the learner must be able to do (Analyze).

2.  Create an instructional plan and determine the method of delivery (Design).

3.  Create instructional materials (Develop and Implement).

4.  Plan to evaluate training effectiveness (Evaluate).

5.  Select method to sustain knowledge (Sustain).

These principles are roughly identical to those found in the Marine Corps’ Systems Approach to Training (SAT) Guide, (SAT Guide 1993).

BLENDED TRAINING

The Marine Corps’ full compliment of options for learning vehicles includes the following list, ordered by our perceived value of the learning experience:

1.  Combat experience

2.  Instrumented live-fire exercises

3.  Live-fire exercises

4.  Training without troops

5.  Distributed virtual simulation

6.  Constructive simulation

7.  Tactical decision gaming

8.  Practical applications (e.g. sand tables)

9.  Classroom instruction

10.  Interactive Multimedia Instruction (IMI)

11.  Books

Obviously this ordering is a very general statement which would change in many instructional circumstances. But, very roughly speaking, the list above shows that availability and affordability are inversely related to validity – an experience is either cheap and easy-to-get or it is highly valid. Some future technologies (see below) have the potential to dramatically change this relationship by making virtual and constructive simulation (medium validity) as available as IMI – perhaps blurring the distinction altogether.

Our imperative is to select the most valid experiences for the high priority learning – the ultimate in what the instructional design community has termed “blended learning.” Blended learning has been defined in the popular instructional design press in many ways to serve many purposes. Using the satisfactory definition of Singh and Reed, (Singh, 2001)...

Blended learning focuses on optimizing achievement of learning objectives by applying the right learning technologies to match the “right” personal learning style to transfer the “right” skills to the “right” person at the “right” time.

It is our premise that existing blended media selection techniques choose their blend components from a small subset of the training technologies available to the Marine Corps. Thus, targeting processes never compare training devices, simulations, or gaming to IMI. Simulation-based training has an under-developed targeting mechanism, and the existing targeting mechanisms are not capable of identifying simulation as a training solution. Crude stove-piping is the result: Simulation is for weapons and unit training, and IMI is for professional military education and correspondence courses.

Blended delivery development has become a somewhat predictable and deliberate activity, so long as the blend options include only IMI, books, classroom lecture, and some limited job aids. The foundation of methods of training media selection such as (Driscoll, 2001), (Air Force, 1998), and (Marx,1999), were designed to highlight the return on investment (ROI) of developing an IMI product, and concentrate on the following qualities:

·  stability and uniformity of the content;

·  focus on skills and procedures;

·  large training audience;

these being the characteristics that make IMI development attractive financially.

The Marines’ most sophisticated tool for media selection, ADVISOR 3.5, based on (Bahlis, 2001), chooses from the full range of interactivity, as defined in (Department of Defense, 1999). In that publication, the highest level of interactivity, level 4, is defined as “Real-time participation – The student is directly involved in a life-like set of complex cues and responses.” This definition, often referred to as “simulation” by IMI developers, dramatically undershoots the capabilities of our existing simulation-based games and training devices.

Prensky, (Prensky, 2001, p. 156) offers a game style selection scheme that matches training task type, e.g. modifying behaviors, with potential gaming styles, e.g. role-playing games, as he makes the case that games have vast applicability across the spectrum of learning settings. Many of the training objectives highlighted as strong game candidates are poor IMI candidates, so the two delivery methods are often complimentary. The Marine Corps has experimented with stand-alone and networked games for a variety of learning tasks including Military Operations in Urban Terrain (MOUT), Marine Expeditionary Unit (MEU) staff processes, drug abuse education, and coordination of task-organized combat action teams.

Composing the Prensky selection scheme with traditional media selection gives us some alternatives for delivery, but still omits distributed simulation, live exercises, training video teleconferencing. Our long-term goal is to re-engineer media selection methodology to fully address the spectrum of training technology available to us.

The future of training support in the Marine Corps will be influenced by a number of factors involving fielded training infrastructure, advances in the capabilities of software in training systems, and changes in the composition of the training audiences.

The Marine Corps is about to experience an explosion in training devices which have embedded entity-level combat simulations. These virtual training devices are, in the main, being designed with interoperability as a fundamental requirement, and are hosted on commodity-level CPUs. Almost one thousand (1000) such training systems are being fielded in the next half-decade, addressing infantry skills and decision making, fire support coordination, platform-based weapon systems operations, command and control systems, and aviation platforms.

Collective command and control training, supported by unit-level constructive simulation, currently occurs in Marine Corps Battle Simulation Centers, located around the world. This training is a mix of command and control tactics, techniques, and procedures for warfighting units. Its focus is preparation of in-tact staffs for planning and executing tasks in real-world operating environments. The Marine Corps will soon field a complimentary training program addressing the skills required to integrate current and future digital command and control systems. The opportunity to co-mingle, cross-train, and synchronize training events between command staffs and their supporting command and control systems operators should lead us to refine these programs in the future.

Despite the immediate impacts of the Navy Marine Corps Internet (NMCI), it is inevitable that some limited level of seamless digital communications capability will be commonplace across the garrisoned Fleet and the Training Establishment.

The Marine Corps is in the process of delivering thousands of seats for Distance Learning (DL) in the form of Learning Resource Centers, which are designed to deliver network-based content in the form of IMI or Electronic Performance Support Systems (EPSS). These DL assets are architected to ensure reliability and efficiency in delivering IMI, learning management functions, testing and scoring to the individual learner. Currently, this architecture precludes learner-to-learner interactivity, and has strictures that exclude many rendering and interactivity solutions embedded in today’s gaming and simulation products.

On the software side, initiatives in academia and industry are spearheading two strong trends:

·  massively parallel synchronous experiences delivered over non-dedicated networks as web services (Brutzman, 2002);

·  game-based learning experiences as a critical element of training programs (Prensky, 2001).

In addition, DoD is clearly moving toward a paradigm where collective synchronous training for a team, a unit, or even a Joint Task Force, is being emphasized at the expense of stand-alone individual training. In the current climate, that means that more activities are forced to occur in the same physical place at the same time.

The trends above will complicate (but enrich) the task of developing blended learning approaches for Marine training, especially as they influence the cost of collective training. The DoD wants massively collective training. Emerging technology can dramatically reduce its cost, but only if the currently-fielding infrastructure can be used for collective training.

THE CHALLENGE

When designing our media selection scheme of the future, we must address all possibilities for delivery without bias. Our challenge is to address all of these options in terms of training capability, economics, logistics, and culture, but without respect to current stovepipes. Our first attempt at doing so involves adaptation of the U. S. Air Force media selection scheme in (U. S. Air Force, 1998). Our challenge, which we share with those who perform research in military instructional system design, is to refine a professional, scientific technology selection process that addresses all options for delivery.

REFERENCES

Bahlis, J. 2001. Selecting the Right Blend of Delivery Options. BNH Expert Software, Inc. http://www.bnhexpertsoft.com.

Brutzman, D. 2002. Extensible Modeling and Simulation Framework (XMSF). The Moves Institute, http://www.movesinstitute.org/xmsf/xmsf.html.

Department of Defense. 1999. Development of Interactive Multimedia Instruction (IMI). DoD Handbook MIL-HDBK-29612-3.

Driscoll, J. 2001. Selecting Delivery Methods. Centra Software, http://www.centra.com/download/education/Selecting_Delivery_Methods.pdf.

Marx, R. 1999. The ASTD Media Selection Tool for Workplace Training. American Association for Training and Development.

Pallsen, P. J. et. al. 1999. Electronic Learning Delivery Systems: A Selection Model. Performance Improvement Quarterly, 12(4), pp. 7-32.

Prensky, M. 2001. Digital Game-Based Learning. McGraw Hill.

Singh, H. and C. Reed. 2002. A White Paper: Acheiving Success with Blended Learning. 2001 ASTD State of the Industry Report. American Society for Training and Development.

U. S. Air Force. 1998. Information for Designers of Instructional Systems. Air Force Handbook 36-2235, Volume 5.

U. S. Marine Corps. 1993. Systems Approach to Training Guide.

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

Dr. Michael Page Bailey was born in Baltimore, Maryland on May 19, 1961. He graduated from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill with a Ph.D in Operations Research in 1988, and became an Assistant Professor of Operations Research at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California. He was promoted to Associate Professor in 1993 and tenured in 1994.
In 1995, he sabbaticaled at the Office of the Chief of Naval Operations, Assessments Division, OPNAV-N81 as a visiting scholar. There he served as operations analyst in support of the Quadrennial Defense Review until 1997, whereupon he joined the Marine Corps as Principal Analyst, Modeling and Simulation. In December 1999, he joined the Marine Corps’ Training and Education Command as Technical Director. In December 2000, the Marine Corps formed the Training and Education Technology Division, with Dr. Bailey as its head. Technology Division is responsible for requirements, policies, and sponsorship of all technology applicable to Marine Corps individual training, unit training, exercises, and ranges.