Epic show report

ITEC 2005

Defence - Training - Simulation

Venue: Amsterdam, Holland
Date: 26 - 28 April 2005

Protesters at e-learning conference

I’ve spoken at several defence conferences, but this was the first time I’ve been heckled by anti-war protestors. ITEC 2005, in Amsterdam, is an e-learning and simulation conference. The protests were on Dutch national news and security was intense – well as intense as you can get in Holland. Even the security staff had that laid back Dutch attitude.

On the first day we were harangued for having blood on our hands. Once the protestors realised that weapons were not on sale, the heckles got a little weird. They switched to claiming we had virtual blood on our hands!

Three hours of keynote speeches
Day one started with a marathon three hour session of speeches (without a break). The speeches were good but the slides were truly ‘Weapons of Mass Distraction’ – mostly images of jets and military personnel sitting at computers. The excellent Dutch host made light of this mammoth test of endurance, recognising that our thirst for learning had been overtaken by just thirst.

The majority of the participants were from Western Europe (60%), USA/Canada (25%), Central and Eastern Europe (12%) and the rest of the world (3%). E-learning was voted (through audience keypads) the item of most interest at 21%, just pipping simulations at 20%, with weapons training a poor 6%. However, there seemed to be a split vote, as both e-learning and electronic learning were put up as separate candidates.

I enjoyed the first slide of the conference, as it had my name on it – no one actually told me, but I was voted the best speaker at last year’s conference. This explains why I was asked to speak twice this year. I really did want to turn around to everyone and say ‘that’s me!’ However, things quickly moved on to the big keynote address by ‘le grand fromage’, General Donald Cook from the US.

Donald Cook
He was gracious about Europe, as his father had fought here in WW2. He also mentioned the protests as ‘democracy in action’, a sensible comment. There was a fascinating sketch of a flight simulation that took place over 50 continuous hours prior to the opening of the war in Afghanistan, with authentic targets, threats and refuelling. In this case the simulated training was part of the operation itself. Simulation is no longer training, it’s just-in-time preparation.

He then made a strange comment, where he called the civilian aircraft used in 9/11 ‘weapons of mass destruction’. I got his point, but it’s hardly the real point. If everything’s a weapon of mass destruction, there would be calls to invade every country that has an airline, stock of fertiliser or envelope openers.

Thankfully, he got back on track describing the ‘Transformation’ in training and education effort in the US military. This was interesting. The transformation, Rumsfeld-led, was operational, technical and doctrinal. He gave examples of all three:

1. Operational - new NATO command structure
2. Technical – Predators first fed data back that was relayed verbally to air crews in Kosovo. This led, eventually, to video feed directly from Predators to air crews.
3. Doctrinal – new NATO response force with air,sea and land under a single proactive command

This was followed by a few moments on how new recruits were better educated and technologically savvy and how technology-led training is starting to match the cognitive expectations of these new recruits. Proof that simulations work was provided. There are 26 simulated sorties for every 3 real flights. Virtual maintenance has also reduced training time by 50% and increased pass rates by 30%. Impressive data.

Then a final description of the work that is being done in what he called ‘near-space’. These are huge balloons and air platforms for surveillance and communications high in the atmosphere. All in all, a good introductory talk.

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Major Peter Von Uhm
Nice guy. Welcomed us all to the Netherlands and gave a realistic account of how training was progressing in his country. The main operational trends were:

• No real threat to sovereignty (interesting but rarely stated political fact)
• Joint and combined at lower level (now the norm)
• Expeditionary forces (need quick geographical and cultural knowledge)
• High intensity operations (train for worst case)
• Effect based operations
• Boots on ground (ground forces still essential)
• Intensity of force fluctuation
• CBNRE assets (chemical, biological, nuclear, radiation, explosive)
• NEC (need for networks)
• New weapons (enemy is flexible and creative – road-side bombs)

Navy Knowledge Online (NKO)
Ann Rondeau gave the most informative talk; it was also the longest. She talked in detail about Navy Knowledge Online. This is a huge and revolutionary (her words) effort to turn training upside down and make it learner-centric. The focus was now on people with a single portal driven by the need to be flexible and agile.

The five vector model was impressive, with professional, personal, leadership, certification and performance vectors matched to progressive levels of job attainment; recruit, apprentice, journeyman and master. Half a million users have interactive resumés. Personal and professional growth is the aim. The development of the system is through spiral growth, with the team learning as they go.

Air Vice Marshall John Ponsonby
No slides in this talk, which by this time was a welcome respite. He talked about the ambiguous battlespace and the need for interoperability. I got confused here – what had the battlespace to do with SCORM – what he meant was co-operation between the services. He was determined to see training as the norm in the RAF while encouraging some intellectual anarchy, giving people the freedom to think for themselves. This tension between necessary discipline and freedom of choice is an interesting debate in the military. To the point.

Joints, joints and more joints
Stephen Moore described the:

• JWCN - Joint Warfighting Center Mission
• JKDDC – Joint Knowledge Development and Distribution Capability
• JNTC – Joint National Training Capability
• JAEC – Joint Assessment and Enabling Capability

A member of the audience then called for a JSG – Joint Simulation Group. I was about to suggest a JGFJJGs (Joint Group for Joining Joint Groups) but I thought the better of it. Then he was off on COMs:

• USJFCOM (I guess the J stands for Joint)
• NORTHCOM
• STRATCOM
• EUCOM
• PACOM
• SOUTHCOM
• TRANSCOM
• CENTCOM

This was actually all about joint training sessions: horizontal, vertical and integrated.

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Commerce still Cold War-centric
Lastly, David Figgins, a vendor, talked about doing business in the military market and complained about procurement being subjected to an amazing amount of legislation and red tape, in particular export controls. He had a good point about the Cold War model still hanging around, but the political environment requires that such controls exist, the political fallout being extreme if transgressions are discovered. Interesting but perhaps a little unbalanced.

And so it came to an end, a three hour forced march at pace with no rest. The learner-centric revolution has clearly not yet taken place here.

MOD loves SCORM
Squadron Leader David Thomas explained how, with a few caveats, the MOD had mandated that a specified amount of training had to be online by 2008. He then gave us an excellent overview of what SCORM is, along with the rationale for going down the SCORM route. Interoperability is clearly the primary aim and he also fielded my question about learning objects with refreshing honesty. A focused presentation for those who want to know about interoperability.

Method not madness
A nice talk on process in e-learning production. The speaker didn’t like Microsoft project much - he’d seen too many Gantt charts stuck on the inside of Project Managers’ offices, when they should be facing outwards. He uses the PADDIE model – Plan, Analyse, Design, Develop, Implement, Evaluate. Of course the first two collapse into one thing, implementation is unplanned and scrappy and evaluation quietly dropped. He claims to have decreased the error rate in Boeing from ‘10 in 60 screens’ to ‘less than 1 in 60 screens’. This sounded right – he wasn’t claiming the impossible - zero errors.

Adaptive learning – maybe
Learning adapted to the learner’s state relative to the goal. In this project the speaker claimed that the learning was truly adaptive. In fact, as a member of the audience pointed out, it was simple conditional branching with repeated remedial loops. More sophisticated adaptive learning has been around for some time with intelligent tutoring, where an expert model is compared to a student model and learning delivered to close the gap. There’s real mileage in this topic and a good discussion ensued at the end of the session. Study showed significant improvements in learning but no costs were provided to show that it was worth the spend.

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Military-Entertainment Complex
My talk on the Military-entertainment Complex, as opposed to the Military-Industrial Complex described by Eisenhower, looked at movies, the internet, games and consumer devices and their potential effect on military training. There has been a shift away from straight weapons training towards knowledge-based training and that’s where games, e-learning and consumer devices come in.

Movies have been used by the military and vice-versa. We looked at Battleship Potemkin, The Battle of Algiers, Braveheart and Kingdom of God, where kit and armies have been rented out.

The internet was shaped by the military and with ADL and SCORM the military have shaped the standards landscape. Huge initiatives such as eArmyU, AKO, NKO show that the internet is now shaping military training.

The military feeds the games industry and the games industry feeds the military. America’s Army has over 5.2 million registered players; 3 million have completed basic training, over 1.34 billion missions played and it is rated a TOP 5 action game. 90% of the 75,000 US recruits are ‘casual gamers’ (ICT) and 30% hardcore gamers (ICT). The games world is truly part of the military-entertainment complex.

Lastly, consumer devices such as DVD, MP3 players, mobiles and consoles all have a potential role in learning.

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Can e-learning be used to train softskills?
It’s the soft stuff that’s hard and indeed the military is having to respond to a shift in demand for softskills. In this talk I looked at the definition of softskills and some problems and issues surrounding the subject.

After discussing offers from Skillsoft, sales training and leadership training, I showed two full demos: one civilian (‘Conflict Resolution’, produced by Epic for the NHS) and one military (‘Stop & Search’, training for interview techniques again produced by Epic, this time for the Royal Military Police).

Conclusion
E-learning is coming of age in the military. There are some truly magnificent projects in the US and increasingly in the UK and Europe, where good planning, careful thought and good content is emerging. This conference was, as one delegate described it, a chance to recharge his intellectual batteries. He had just come back from the Sudan and was about to head back. That’s spot on. However, there’s a real split between the old simulation companies and the newer e-learning companies. Their high cost, hi-res graphics are vastly different from our lower cost, pragmatic solutions.

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