As if training the military wasn't enough, the joint-staff training office must build e-learning modules that outlast the latest technology. Here's how.

Despite the enormity of their primary mission--to train and prepare the military--the folks in the joint-staff training office think bigger still.

A mission of military trainers is to create common standards for reuse and interoperability of training technologies, which grew out of the government's need for cost savings. In the past, training platforms changed every few years; for example, from one-inch tape to three-fourths-inch tape to half-inch tape to interactive video disk to CD-ROM to DVD, all of which was proprietary. Each time the platform changed, trainers had to adapt the training content to the new media format. Because of that, trainers could never implement learning technology on as large a scale as they would have liked.

In the early 1990s, realizing that one flight simulator couldn't talk to another one, military trainers decided to set standards. They created the distributed interactive simulation protocol, which morphed into high-level architecture, common standards that allow interoperability between simulators for team training and reuse of simulation objects, such as tanks, ships, planes, and projectiles. In doing so, the trainers saved quite a bit of money by not reinventing the wheel.

Having solved that standards problem for simulations, trainers began looking into how such common technology standards might be used across broader education and training areas. The Quadrennial Defense Review, led military trainers to conclude that using learning technology on a very large scale could save a billion dollars a year. To use technology without reinventing it every five years, trainers realized that they needed a common standard so that content could be built once and reused over and over again. If the same standard cut across the public and private sectors and academia, it would allow the development of shared learning objects, which would seriously drive down investment costs. The result was the development of ADL, a standard which provides a framework for a distributed-learning environment, allowing distribution of high-quality content to any device, anywhere, at any time.

A new ADL specification, the Sharable Courseware Object Reference Model (SCORM), extends the common standards to digital games. Developed in conjunction with Microsoft, Oracle, IBM, Macromedia, and standards groups, it enables games to share and reuse objects and be played on any kind of platform.

Published: February 2001