CultureGear: Upacking How to Teach
Generalizable Cross-cultural Skills
Best
Practices for Eliciting and Transferring Expertise through Communities of
Practice
Expertise
in Making Sense of Cultural Surprises
DRIVING WISDOM: IMPROVING RISK MANAGEMENT OF COMMON DRIVING HAZARDS
Enticing
mistakes: A strategy within simulation training of soft skills
Automated, Interactive AARs: A Positive
Spin
Collective Training – The Training Needs
Analysis Challenge
Learning
to Evaluate Multi-Disciplinary Emergency
Management Teams
Development and Assessment of Battlefield
Visualization Training for Battalion Commanders
Assessing Knowledge Management Maturity
within NASA’s Johnson Space Center
Harnessing the Promise of Social Networks
Using Instructional Theory
Further Investigations of Army Lifelong
Learning: An Enhanced Assessment Framework
Front-End Analysis: Top-Down, Bottom-Up,
or Both?
Knowledge Objects and Learning Objects:
Birds of a Feather or Different Species Altogether?
Aligning Instructional Design and
Technical Standards
CultureGear:
Upacking How to Teach Generalizable Cross-cultural Skills
2008 Paper No. 8005 Michael J. McCloskey 361 Interactive Dayton, OH Holly C. Baxter, Ph.D. Strategic Knowledge Solutions, Inc. Vandalia, OH As instructional designers and
trainers, both military and civilian, have begun to understand how to teach
behavioral and cognitive cultural skills within specific environments, they
continue to struggle with how to generalize these skills across cultures.
This study identified a variety of skills that support general cross-cultural
perspective taking in military settings, including directed preparation and
observation, sense making, prediction, and proactive decision making. But
simply identifying these skills is not enough. Prior research has shown that
even if the instructional content is well developed, it will only result in
effective learning transfer if an appropriate learning methodology is
employed. The key to enhancing performance in diverse cultural settings is
understanding how to tailor educational principles, learning objectives, and
delivery means to the standards required to perform in complex environments. This
study took an in-depth look at instructional method selection for training
generalizable cross-cultural skills by exploring learning theory literature
and interactive delivery methods, including multimedia and scenario-based
approaches, to address the cognitive and cultural challenges faced by today’s
deployed Soldiers. The study yielded both a model of generalizable,
mission-centric cultural skills and suggestions for methods to train those
skills for optimal learning transfer. This paper is available on the 2008 I/ITSEC CD
ROM. Order the paper from I/ITSEC’s Website. |
Best Practices for Eliciting and
Transferring Expertise through Communities of Practice
2008 Paper No. 8006 Holly C. Baxter, Ph.D., Michael
Prevou, Ph.D. Strategic
Knowledge Solutions, Inc. Vandalia,
OH, Leavenworth, KS Ron Pruyt Dynamics
Research Corporation Leavenworth,
KS The ability to share tacit
knowledge and expertise rapidly between and among teams is crucial in today’s
high-stakes organizations. The shift away from individual explicit routine
tasks to a more team-based environment makes it imperative that we adapt by
exploiting observations, insights, and lessons learned to create dynamic
relevant training that develops more adaptive teams. Without effective
knowledge capture and transfer techniques, these valuable lessons learned and
best practices can go to waste. One of the biggest challenges is that
expertise is very difficult to capture and share in a timely manner using
traditional methods. Finding a way to do this in an innovative format is
critical to maintaining a competitive advantage. A new method for quickly
capturing and sharing expertise from the field to the classroom is by using
traditional community of practice forums in a very nontraditional way. ;.
This study looks at how we went about transforming the US Army Transition
Team Forum from a traditional knowledge management forum into a
transformational educational tool that gives soldiers the ability to rapidly
share and transfer lessons learned though the use of stories and other
methods in an online structured forum format. This paper discusses how key
principles of Cognitive Task Analysis were applied to an online community of
practice in order to capture and transfer expertise among soldiers. We
discuss the types of information we were capturing prior to any changes, how
we altered the language used in the questions to capture expertise in a
transferable format, and the significant change in both knowledge capture and
transfer we saw as a result. Additionally, we share our lessons learned
including best practices and tips for improving questions that stimulate
discussion in communities and to move them from knowledge storerooms to
knowledge sharing tools. This
paper is available on the 2008 I/ITSEC CD ROM. Order the paper from I/ITSEC’s
Website. |
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Expertise in Making Sense of Cultural Surprises
2008 Paper No. 8342 Winston R. Sieck, Jennifer L. Smith, Louise J. Rasmussen Cognitive Science Group, Klein
Associates Division, ARA Inc. Fairborn, OH Culture is
often treated as lists of context-general trait dimensions, such as power
distance or individualism/collectivism. From this view, cultural awareness training
often amounts to assessing dimensions for individual trainees, and showing
how their responses differ from typical responses of the target culture. An
important issue with this “dimensions” approach is that it can lead to a
sophisticated form of stereotyping, as trainees learn overly simple models of
the target culture. We have been exploring alternative conceptions of
culture, as well as the processes by which experts, for whom successful
cultural interactions are essential to their tasks, exploit opportunities to
improve their cultural understanding. In the present paper, we describe a
study in which participants with differing levels of expertise played the
role of an Information Operations officer in a vignette. Specifically,
participants (n=60) were either laypeople with no military background,
novices who were trained in Information Operations, or individuals who had
training and Information Operations field experience. The vignette was based
a real incident set in Kosovo that was elicited by cognitive task analysis
methods in an earlier study. The scenario contained surprising events
associated with the respective target cultural group. Participants were asked
to explain their understanding of the situation in a think-aloud procedure,
as well as what they would want to know to inform their understanding. Our
results indicated several differences between the strategies used by novices
and experts to make sense of cultural anomalies. Experts tended to generate
more alternative explanations than novices, were more likely to consider
culture as an explanation for the surprising events, and tended to ask
questions that would explicitly challenge fundamental assumptions underlying
their conception of the culture. Implications of the study for cultural training
are discussed. This
paper is available on the 2008 I/ITSEC CD ROM. Order the paper from I/ITSEC’s
Website. |
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DRIVING WISDOM: IMPROVING RISK MANAGEMENT
OF COMMON DRIVING HAZARDS
2008 Paper No. 8186
Nearly 50% of accidental deaths in the Army
during 2006 occurred in privately-owned vehicles – more than from any other
source. As a result, the Army has been actively pursuing ways of reducing POV
deaths and injuries among soldiers by improving driver training programs. An
extensive literature has examined the link between driving hazards and risk
assessment with crash metrics. Drivers begin by identifying a hazard, and
then must assess the risk and decide whether or not they can handle it. More
experienced drivers are consistently better at recognizing hazards and
assessing risk and may also adopt better strategies for mitigating risk. By
identifying and teaching these strategies, younger drivers can be trained to
respond to risks in safer ways. We have devised a unique method for
understanding the strategies that more experienced drivers use, and for
validating the impact that these strategies have on driving safety. Using a
combination of critical incident interviews and reviews of naturalistic
driving data we identified common hazards and designed a case-based driving
scenario that incorporates those hazards and allows for the use of associated
strategies. We implemented the scenario in a driving simulator to empirically
demonstrate that the use of appropriate strategies can reduce the risk of the
common hazards in the scenario. Then the scenario was embedded in an online
training system that prompts users to respond with text descriptions of their
likely driving behavior. Using machine learning technologies, the response is
assessed, and relevant feedback, incorporating practical strategies for
reducing risk, is returned. This
paper is available on the 2008 I/ITSEC CD ROM. Order the paper from I/ITSEC’s
Website. |
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Enticing mistakes: A strategy within
simulation training of soft skills
2008 Paper No. 8199 Robert Hubal,
Geoffrey Frank RTI International Research Triangle Park, NC Simulation-based systems are increasingly
being used for training “soft” skills such as providing cultural
understanding, conducting interrogations and interviewing, and assessing
adaptive thinking and leadership. Simulation-based training systems can be
conceived as having three major components. First, an environment model
drives actions and responses of simulated entities (objects, machines,
terrain, avatars) in the virtual environment. Second, a student model
maintains the system’s understanding of the state of the student’s knowledge
and skills. Third, an instructional model selects and sequences the learning
experiences of the student and provides feedback to the student based on
inputs from the environment model and the student model. The latter two
components partly define intelligent tutoring to guide simulation flow to
promote learning. This paper describes lessons learned in
evolving simulation-based training systems for procedural skills into
trainers for soft skills, particularly changes required in the student and
instructional models. These simulations are being developed for intelligence
analysis training. The remediation methods of the instructional model
developed for procedural training were revised for soft skills since the soft
skill performance criteria are less well defined in terms of student actions
and simulation events. This revision required a more robust student model
that can infer student bias and other imperfect conceptual models. The
sequencing of instructional events was modified to take advantage of
parameterized initial values and introduce a “sting” meant to entice students
to make decisions consistent with imperfect conceptual models. The selection
of enticements requires more interactions between the student model and the
instructional model than was present in the procedural training simulations.
Scenario-based training supports practice and assessment on multiple learning
objectives at the same time. The configuration and sequencing of
instructional events provides variable reinforcement of multiple learning
objectives. This
paper is available on the 2008 I/ITSEC CD ROM. Order the paper from I/ITSEC’s
Website. |
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Automated, Interactive AARs: A Positive
Spin
2008 Paper No. 8258 Geoffrey Frank, Noah Evens, Robert Hubal, Brooke Whiteford RTI International Research Triangle
Park, North Carolina An effective student performance review strategy
is to provide positive feedback before providing critical guidance, then to
intersperse positive feedback throughout the review. The amount of positive
feedback must be balanced against the necessity to continuously impart
current and relevant information. An early emphasis of positive feedback
helps to engage the student, and variably reinforced positive feedback
maintains that engagement, resulting in the student remaining open to
critical learning content. This demands a high degree of interactivity
throughout the review process, a strategy applicable to human instructors and
automated intelligent tutoring systems. This paper describes a strategy for
integrating automated, interactive After Action Reviews (AARs) with
simulations to provide student-tailored feedback based on positive,
session-specific information. The underlying methods rely on the
meta-relations among hierarchies, including learning objectives, demonstrated
student achievements and weaknesses, simulation events, and scenario-to-learning
objective mapping. The generated AAR output allows the student to drill down
to specific details of the AAR, explore how student decisions impact results,
and obtain recommendations for learning objective–specific remediation. The
approach presumes both that the simulation is assessing multiple learning
objectives from a single scenario and that a cross-linkage of learning
objectives cuts across multiple lessons, systems, and disciplines. These
intelligent tutoring strategies were derived using a Force XXI Battle Command
for Brigade and Below (FBCB2) simulation, which provided training on the
installation, operation, and maintenance of the FBCB2 system of systems,
including not only the AN/UYK 128 computer, but also the associated
Single-Channel Ground and Airborne Radio System and Enhanced Position
Location Reporting System radios and the Precision Lightweight GPS Receiver
global positioning system. This
paper is available on the 2008 I/ITSEC CD ROM. Order the paper from I/ITSEC’s
Website. |
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Collective Training – The Training Needs
Analysis Challenge
2008
Paper No. 8238 Dr John Huddlestone, Jonathan Pike Cranfield University Cranfield, Bedfordshire, UK Training Needs Analysis (TNA) is the UK
Ministry of Defence (MoD) instantiation of the Systems Approach to Training
for use in the Acquisition process. It is derived from the long established
SAT process used for the development of individual training. A current
concern for the MoD is how this process can be applied to collective training
in the light of current acquisitions such as the Carrier Strike capability
for the Royal Navy. The aim of this paper is to identify how the current TNA
process can be enhanced to cater for collective training by incorporating
additional models and tools to facilitate the analysis process. Evaluation of
collective organizations and tasks shows that the key additional elements
which must be catered for in the TNA process are command and control,
communication and teamwork. These are found to be consistent across the land,
maritime and air domains. The analytical approach must embrace both the
interactions between individuals and teams and the cognitive nature of these
additional elements. We demonstrate that a range of human factors methods
which have proven utility in the military domain can be identified as
potential methods for inclusion in a “Toolbox” of methods for collective TNA.
In addition, models of command and control can be identified which may
facilitate the development of generic training requirements for collective
training. We also identify that further research is required to determine the
exact nature of the contribution made by live training if an efficient and
effective balance between live and synthetic training is to be achieved when
determining training options for the collective domain. This
paper is available on the 2008 I/ITSEC CD ROM. Order the paper from I/ITSEC’s
Website. |
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Learning to Evaluate Multi-Disciplinary
Emergency Management Teams
2008 Paper No. 8114
Emergencies can vary considerably in nature
and may call upon different kind or organizations. The need for
multi-disciplinary cooperation in general, and civil-military cooperation in specific,
is still increasing. Training of multi-disciplinary emergency management
teams is becoming more common practice. Nevertheless, the value of these
trainings and exercises is questionable. Although scenarios are quite often
realistic and challenging to the trainees, the degree to which they can
really learn from these experiences depends on more than just the realism.
The training situation may be too complex to get a good understanding of the
team’s performance. A solid evaluation afterwards is therefore of utmost
importance. However, an effective evaluation requires expert-evaluators. In
many cases evaluators are themselves experts in the field, but that does not
automatically guarantee them to be expert-evaluators. They need to be able to
not only observe and diagnose the team’s performance, but also to give
feedback in an effective and structured way. Improving the competencies of
evaluators is therefore conditional for increasing the effectiveness of
multi-disciplinary exercises from a learning perspective. Supported by the
Dutch Home Office, a six-day course was developed combining practical
experience and results of scientific research. The trainees learn more about
observing multi-disciplinary team performance, conducting an evaluation with
the team, and writing an evaluation report. Hands-on experience is combined
with short theoretical reflections. Afterwards, the trainees follow an
interactive examination during which their performance is assessed by two
independent examiners. Up to now, six courses have been conducted and more
are to come. Every course is evaluated based on which the next course is
improved. Trainees come from first responder organizations, the military and
other organizations (e.g. municipality). This paper describes the structure
and contents of both the course and the exam, and discusses shared
experiences. This
paper is available on the 2008 I/ITSEC CD ROM. Order the paper from I/ITSEC’s
Website. |
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Development and Assessment of Battlefield
Visualization Training for Battalion Commanders
2008
Paper No. 8236
Visualization–the art and science of developing situational
understanding, determining a desired end state, and envisioning how to move
the force from its current state to the desired end state–is critical to successful
battle command. Unfortunately, the most common method of training battle
command in today’s Army is not the most effective method for developing
expert visualization skills. Recent research on expertise indicates that
experience alone, be it real or in simulated battle, is not adequate
(Shadrick, Lussier, & Fultz, 2007). Instead, expertise is more likely to
be attained through a combination of education, training, practice, and
experience. For those reasons, the U.S. Army Research Institute for the Behavioral
and Social Sciences (ARI) initiated an analysis to better understand how
expert battalion commanders visualize battlefields, and to develop a
structured, theme-based training program. Results of that analysis revealed
four distinct dimensions of visualization (Build, Synchronize, Assess, and
Exploit) and seven associated skills. The dimensions and skills provide the
framework for End State: Commander Visualization at the Battalion
Level. End State is an interactive training program designed to provide
field grade officers and battalion commanders with education, training,
practice, and experience in battlefield visualization. The training uses
3-dimensional animated coaches to relay the knowledge and perspectives of
expert commanders and to provide immediate performance evaluation and
feedback. In this paper, we discuss an analysis that led to the visualization
framework and skills, the development of End State training, and the
results of initial tests of End State with battalion commanders. This
paper is available on the 2008 I/ITSEC CD ROM. Order
the paper from I/ITSEC’s Website. |
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Assessing Knowledge Management Maturity within
NASA’s Johnson Space Center
2008 Paper No. 8348
Johnson Space Center (JSC) has been
directed to establish new innovative programs in engineering while continuing to fulfill the
requirements of its current programs. As a result, the Space Shuttle Program
is transitioning to a new innovative
program called Constellation which is expected to become just as, if not more, critical. To aid in this
transition while retaining and preserving institutional knowledge and
expertise for the next generation of
engineers, program managers and leaders, the center needed mechanisms in
place to manage the sharing and
acquisition of knowledge throughout the entire knowledge lifecycle. First,
the CKO sponsored a Knowledge
Management Assessment Project (KMAP) to determine the knowledge management maturity of the
center. This was the first step in developing and implementing a KM roadmap. To accomplish the KMAP, SAIC used
a mixed methods approach to assess the approximately 10,000 civil servants and contractors across
the center. First, focus groups and interviews were used to understand JSC’s as-is environment.
Utilizing the qualitative Global Knowledge Management Maturity Model (GKMMM) developed by Pee, Teah, and
Kankanhalli (2006), a quantitative instrument (Q-Assess) was developed by SAIC and tailored
using results from the qualitative analyses. Implemented online, the QAssess represented 12 sub-assessments
for assessing levels of maturity across the KPAs (key performance areas) of people, processes, and
technology. Using the Q-Assess results as the condition and the GKMMM itself as the criterion, a multi-unit
gap analysis was produced. As JSC’s KM maturity was identified within each unit,
recommendations were than developed to facilitate the attainment of the next
level of maturity. These results fed the development of the roadmap. This
roadmap contained the implementation of knowledge and technology audits leading to the
development of an organizational knowledge architecture and enterprise architecture in support of
knowledge management, ensuring shareability, compatibility, and preservation. This
paper is available on the 2008 I/ITSEC CD ROM. Order the paper from I/ITSEC’s
Website. |
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Harnessing the Promise of Social Networks
Using Instructional Theory
2008 Paper No. 8156
The potential of social networking and the
advent of new technologies designed to facilitate collaboration and the
sharing of information has the training industry excited. Designers,
developers, and executives are searching for ways to incorporate the wild
success of social networking sites like Facebook and My Space into learning
products. Incorporating social networking into blended learning solutions
promises new levels of learning and performance success. Blended learning
solutions incorporating social networking are greatly influenced by cognitive
and constructivist theories, specifically social learning theory and informal
learning. However, social networks are userbuilt from the bottom up and
blended learning solutions are built by instructional designers from the top
down. How then do we marry the theory and practice of building effective
blended learning solutions with the promise of social networking’s ability to
facilitate collaboration and information sharing as a learning tool? This
paper describes the judicious use of instructional theory to harness the
potential of social networks, assisted, but not controlled by technology, to
meet the educational and organizational goals of the Air Force Functional
Area Manager (FAM) community. Because FAMs ensure the appropriate placement
of personnel and equipment to fulfill military missions, effective FAM
training and knowledge transfer can mean the difference between life and death
for Air Force personnel. This paper presents a case study that demonstrates
lessons learned and a practical approach to creating a full spectrum of
learning, performance, and knowledge management strategies in a blended
learning solution. The case study also demonstrates the effectiveness of the
design approach using empirical data such as usage fluctuations, member
activities, and surveys. Using an online CoP as the centralized gateway for
learning, job support, and organizational knowledge, FAMs were able to
quickly receive training and establish personal networks for gathering
information and obtaining quick answers to common questions. This
paper is available on the 2008 I/ITSEC CD ROM. Order the paper from I/ITSEC’s
Website. |
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Further Investigations of Army Lifelong
Learning: An Enhanced Assessment Framework
2008
Paper No. 8056 Dr. Anna T. Cianciolo Command Performance Research, Inc. Champaign, IL The lifelong learning concept has
been advanced as an Army-wide solution to the problem of meeting the
educational demands of a rapidly changing operational environment. Lifelong
Learning Centers (LLCs) comprise a suite of technologies that enable, among
other things, online posting of schoolhouse curriculum materials, courseware
downloads, and distributed collaboration among users. Previous research
(Cianciolo, 2007) has produced a comprehensive framework for conceptualizing
how resources invested in LLCs can produce change to instruction, learning,
and organizational effectiveness. It was demonstrated that the framework was
a feasible and useful tool for conducting a program evaluation of LLCs as
applied to leader education, but the limited scope of the study prevented an
explicit test of the generalizability of the assessment framework. The
present study examined the generalizability of the assessment framework to
military operational specialty (MOS) qualification training. The assessment
framework generalized across the two different types of LLCs, but
modification was necessary in order to reflect additional determinants of
organizational impact. These additional determinants were factors external to
the sphere of influence of the LLC, chiefly personnel management and
institutional training procedures, which can moderate the relation between
outputs and outcomes. Some modification also was made to metrics and measures
in order to include more generalizable and usable methods for capturing LLC
outcomes. Lifelong learning assessment lessons learned were documented and
integrated into a general plan for future LLC assessments. This
paper is available on the 2008 I/ITSEC CD ROM. Order the paper from I/ITSEC’s
Website. |
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Using E-Learning Technologies and
Educational Theories to Create Blended Facilitative Training for the Royal
Navy
2008 Paper No. 8123 Lieutenant
Commander Paul Pine, Lieutenant Steven Fulthorpe Royal Navy HMS COLLINGWOOD, UK With the Royal Navy’s Type 45 Destroyer now
entering into Service, a new generation of training is required for this next
generation of ship. With the recent growth of internet training technologies,
the Royal Navy has decided that the Type 45 would be their vanguard in the
large scale adoption of modern e-learning solutions, bringing the rest of the
Fleet in its wake. With no indigenous e-learning capability of its own, the
Royal Navy formed the Type 45 Training Unit to develop this new breed of
training, moving it towards an e-learning culture and 21st Century ways of
working. This paper highlights the production of this
new Blended Facilitative Training which is being developed on an almost
industrial scale. By using e-learning technologies including LMS, LCMS and
bite size synthetic training media, along with an up-skilled team of
developers, this paper will describe how the Royal Navy has changed the way
it designs and delivers its training to provide flexible and responsive
personnel that deliver and enhance Operational Capability. Throughout this
process the Royal Navy has used recognized academic educational theories to
further enhanced training outputs, through exercising higher level cognitive
skills, delivering new knowledge in a more interactive way and producing
assessments that assure competence and reduce skill fade. These theories have
also been used to improve design processes, by guiding novice developers to
produce high quality content, aided by templates that would be expected of
professional training designers. Through sharing many of the lessons learnt,
this paper provides examples of how to bring learning theory into practice
and improve the pedagogy of blended elearning through facilitative delivery. This
paper is available on the 2008 I/ITSEC CD ROM. Order the paper from I/ITSEC’s
Website. |
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Front-End Analysis: Top-Down, Bottom-Up,
or Both?
2008
Paper No. 8339 Wendy R. Weeks, Ellen M. Le Vita, James A. Hadley The Boeing Company Seattle, WA When
developing a training curriculum for a new military platform, training
analysts and instructional systems designers can use two basic approaches for
content analysis: One, a top-down functional analysis of missions and the
tasks which support them; or, two, a bottom-up approach of identifying the
knowledge and skills required based on the platform systems and tasks. Each
approach has different uses and outcomes. Applying both methods, though, has
its merits for developing a complete and effective curriculum design. Since
2004, the training systems support team at Naval Air Systems Command (NAVAIR)
and The Boeing Company has been performing front-end analysis for the new
P-8A Poseidon, a multi-mission maritime aircraft. This effort began with a
top-down functional analysis of all aircraft roles and identifying associated
mission tasks. The approach was intended to produce a purely task-based
curriculum for pilot and mission crews. However, during the process, the team
also applied a bottom-up analysis of the curriculum design to verify adequate
coverage of content. Similarly a top-down, bottom-up approach was also
applied to the instructional strategies to ensure instructional fidelity. This paper
presents a brief overview of the completed front-end analysis process and
discusses some of the many lessons learned about the strengths and
limitations of a large scale front-end analysis. Also discussed are the roles
of instructional strategies in effectively sequencing tasks during design. This
paper is available on the 2008 I/ITSEC CD ROM. Order the paper from I/ITSEC’s
Website. |
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Knowledge Objects and Learning Objects: Birds of a Feather
or Different Species Altogether? 2008 Paper No. 8312
Learning objects (LOs) are essential building blocks of Sharable Content Object Reference Model (SCORM)-conformant training and performance support systems, and have been the subject of extensive research, development, and application efforts. A close relative to the LO is the knowledge object (KO) which is undergoing a semantic and structural identity crisis. Some practitioners consider KOs equivalent to LOs; others see KOs as structural components of LOs; still others see KOs and LOs to be ill-defined, unrelated entities. In short, there has been a diversity of opinion about the defining characteristics of KOs, their essential components and structure, and their relationship to LOs. Merrill and his colleagues provided insights on KOs during the exposition of his Instructional Transaction Theory in the 1990s. There has been a recent increase in interest in KOs, evidenced by theoretical and application issues addressed in the International Journal of Knowledge Objects and Learning Objects and related publications, as well as in less formal treatises on the Internet. The premise of this paper is that there is a need for a better understanding of, and utilization guidelines for, KOs used in training and performance support. Specifically, there is a need to address key KO issues such as how to: 1) achieve free-standing KOs, 2) make KOs usable across multiple contexts; 3) define an appropriate tagging standard, 4) standardize KO terminology, presentation tone, and keywords, and 5) facilitate the contextualization of content. In this paper we provide a critical review of KOs and LOs, address KO issues, and make practical recommendations for their effective use. To provide real-world context, we briefly reference ongoing work by the U.S. Defense Ammunition Center to develop and implement KOs in the operational domains of ammunition safety hazardous materials transportation. This
paper is available on the 2008 I/ITSEC CD ROM. Order the paper from I/ITSEC’s
Website. |
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Aligning Instructional Design and
Technical Standards
2008 Paper No. 8313 Damon
Regan, Robby Robson Eduworks
Corporation Corvallis,
OR What is a Sharable Content Object
(SCO) in an instructional design context? The frequency with which this
question is asked is symptomatic of a much larger problem: There is no accepted
alignment between units of instruction and units of technical standards. The Sharable Content Object
Reference Model (SCORM) community has tried to create alignment by starting
with a SCO. For example, models have been proposed that equate a terminal
learning objective with a SCO. These models are not compatible with the inner
workings of SCORM and the practice is discouraged by the Advanced Distributed
Learning (ADL) Initiative (Roberts & Blackmon, 2006). Another approach is
to give up on lower levels of granularity and simply equate a course with a
SCORM content package. This does not help create reusable content that takes
proper advantage of SCORM capabilities. This paper starts with two
observations. First, most proposed alignments consider levels of granularity
defined by SCORM but do not consider the units of granularity inherent in
instructional design theories. Second, reusability (a key business driver
behind SCORM) occurs more often at the level of a complete instructional
strategy than at the level of an instructional event. From there, the paper
constructs a proposed alignment and discusses its properties and benefits. This
paper is available on the 2008 I/ITSEC CD ROM. Order the paper from I/ITSEC’s
Website. |
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E-learning Lifecycle Costs: Up-Front
Decisions for Managers and ISDs
2008 Paper No. 8145 Dan Young SCCI Austin, TX When training managers and instructional
designers assess e-learning projects, it is well understood that the
volatility of the subject matter will directly impact maintenance costs, for
the simple reason that subject matter areas with a high rate of change
require more frequent content updates. There are well-known approaches using
web technologies and modular design that can mitigate these costs when course
content is anticipated to be volatile. Less well understood, however, is how
changes to requirements impact lifecycle costs, and how technology and course
design can be used to mitigate costs when this kind of change occurs. Changes
to audience, course length, level of interactivity, hosting or delivery
environment, assessment methodology, delivery language, branding, and course
scope are common lifecycle events in today’s e-learning landscape. Typically,
however, changes to requirements are seldom anticipated or designed for at
the outset of an elearning project. Instead, requirements are assumed to be static,
with the result that if and when they do change, the costs can be high. This
paper will present original research demonstrating that changes to e-learning
requirements occur routinely over the product lifecycle, and it will examine
some of the impact associated with different kinds of changes. An analogy
will be drawn between content volatility (where future maintenance costs are
routinely anticipated and mitigated) and changes to requirements, where such
changes should also be (but seldom are) anticipated and mitigated.
Quantitative survey results indicating the frequency of different kinds of
requirements changes will be shown, and mitigation strategies will be
presented, including the roles of template-based design, SCORM, XML content
storage, and Simplified Technical English. This
paper is available on the 2008 I/ITSEC CD ROM. Order the paper from I/ITSEC’s
Website. |
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