Collaborative & Mobile Learning in the US Military

The US Military has always striven to enhance training with technology, and pioneered e-learning when the Army Signal School stared to experiment with using television for training in the 1950s, and when the Air Force Institute of Technology began using commercial phone networks to deliver instructional content in the 1970s. In 1996, the Army created a distance learning program for troops to access college degree programs over a combination of Internet and satellite teleconferencing. Recently, the US military has been embracing the training potential of collaborative and mobile learning.

The Army Training Network (ATN) provides a collaboration hub for military trainers and educators to access training products, training management tools and information. The ATN provides a collaborative learning network for trainers, in which they are able to share best practices and learn from each other's experiences. Since its launch in April 2009, the ATN has become a centralized location for training tools, videos, models, and manuals that soldiers and commanders can access over the Internet. The ATN was further enhanced with the release of iOS and Android apps in 2010, which provide mobile access to the training content and communities, and new versions of the apps even provide offline access to training content.

The US military has further embraced mobile technology, and even hosted a military app contest in 2010 to encourage innovation. The Army Signal Corps' Information Systems Management division, FA53, has converted the Army's extensive training content into mobile apps, including the Soldier's Blue Book, which is the new recruit's training reference and has a history going back to its first inception by Baron von Steuben during the Revolutionary War. Other FA53 Apps range from bugle calls to physical fitness training apps. The Air Force has followed suit, and developed a basic military training app for new recruits.

The US Navy has produced an iOS app primarily for recruitment, but due to the data bandwidth restrictions inherent in ships that rely on satellites for Internet connection while at sea, mobile devices where of little use for sailors on the ocean, and couldn't be used at all if sailors or marines had to ride smaller boats away from their ship. However, the Navy has recently started adding LTE infrastructure to ships to ensure sailors can access a network from distances of up to 20 nautical miles from their ship, and thus sailors and marines will be able to use mobile devices during training exercises that require them to be located away from their ship's wi-fi network.

Advanced Distributed Learning (ADL), the Department of Defense's organization that is dedicated to e-learning, has embraced collaborative and mobile learning as part of its Next Generation Learner initiative. Even the latest edition of SCORM, ADL's standard for ensuring inter-portability of e-learning content between learning management systems, has incorporated collaborative and mobile learning into its structure. This new standard, the Tin Can API, allows for collaboration in learning environments, as well as online and offline access to learning on mobile devices. This new standard will help ensure that learning can happen anytime and anywhere for the military, as well as for civilian organizations that adopt the standards.