Web 2.0, Deployed
Written by Cynthia L. Webb
MAE 2009 Volume: 4 Issue: 6 (November/December)
While she has put her degree on hold while deployed because she has limited access to the commercial Internet, she will restart her courses this spring. Ferrell uses Washington, D.C.-based Blackboard’s online learning software to view assignments, take part in class discussions and submit tests.
“The ‘whiteboard’ feature is one of the most interactive tools,” Ferrell said in an e-mail from Iraq. “It allows instructors to conduct real-time lectures, draw diagrams, type text and make notes that appear on each student’s screen. I’ve seen this used very effectively during science or mathbased courses or lessons, where diagrams and equations are critical,” Ferrell said, noting that when the visual elements are paired with the streaming audio of the lecture, “there’s little difference between viewing the class behind your computer screen and sitting at a desk in the classroom.”
Ferrell also likes that she can have a private chat session with a professor.
“This allows students to ask questions for clarification and make sidebar comments without interrupting the entire class,” she said, adding that students often create Facebook pages to get to know people in the class or use Twitter to discuss schedules and react to exams and lectures. “It’s interesting because like traditional classrooms, the social dynamic of a class can be worked out over Facebook. You know who has a family, a thriving business, who plays in a band on the weekend.”
SOCIAL STUDIES
Twitter and Facebook are just some of the Web 2.0 technology tools that military students, much like their civilian counterparts, are using to learn from afar— whether to take undergraduate or graduate courses through universities with online programs or for continuing military education offered through the different military branches.
“There’s a lot of faculty now that are participating in social networking,” such as creating Facebook accounts for classes and blogging about coursework, according to David M. White, an associate professor of education who administers Troy University’s Southeast region.
For military members that might be deployed and have limited Internet access, Troy has restructured its courses so that many course materials can be downloaded in groups for offline work. Troy University has about 30,000 students and about 40 percent are military. The school uses Blackboard software and also New York, N.Y.-based Wimba’s collaborative learning software for audio and videoconferencing tools. Students on Facebook can sign up for class alerts through Blackboard. A voice feedback tool lets teachers give comments to students, said Deb Gearhart, director of Troy’s eCampus, which offers 19 online degree programs.
Gearhart, who has been working in distance learning education for 23 years, said the school is looking at ways to develop more content that can be downloaded to e-readers, including cell phones and other handheld devices—particularly useful for military members with limited Internet access.
“What we really need to look at is being very mindful, so that we are giving servicemembers their best educational experience we can and not just using technology to use it,” Gearhart said.
EXTENSIONS OF CLASS WORK
The U.S. Army’s Command and General Staff College (CGSC) in Fort Leavenworth, Kan., which provides intermediate-level education for field-grade officers, has a Lifelong Learning Center that uses Blackboard software, as well as blogs, wikis and e-reader tools to help soldiers learn, according to Jake Pennington, an Army retiree and contractor who manages the center.
“We are really starting to see a growth” in social networking tools. A lot of the school’s elective courses have “embraced blogs,” Pennington said.
Professors might create blogs and wikis for courses, Pennington said. A wiki can be built and edited by someone with little to no Web training and is a simplified user interface that includes interlinked Web pages and discussions within a browser. The blogs and wikis become an extension of material learned in class and a place where students can chat online and talk about coursework. Students can often log back into sites after they graduate to share information or use it to find updated information for field work, Pennington said.
“You are creating lifelong learning experiences,” Pennington said. “It used to be that you would come to school and you would take all your books and move them around the world” after classes ended. Now there are online tools that give coursework staying power beyond class time—what the Army likes to call “reach-back capabilities,” Pennington said.
The school also uses Microsoft Office’s SharePoint software to collaborate on documents and Defense Connect Online (Adobe Connect) for virtual meetings to work together in a real-time environment, Pennington said. Soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan and others working from home stateside can participate in classes. Some 5,500 students a year participate in distance learning through the center annually, in addition to the roughly 1,200 in-residence students and a number of other reserve and satellite spots tapping into the center’s resources, Pennington said.
Mobile education is also on the rise, with students using iPhones and other smartphones to tap into their class work or stream audio and video from classes, Pennington said. Selected coursework is put online in e-reader format for students to download, though the Army is trying to determine ways to make the material universal for all e-reader devices because some students might have Kindles and others could be using their phones to view texts.
SPURRING ONLINE DISCUSSION
Another advocate for the new technology is Colonel Robert Morris, a former director of the Army’s distributed learning program for TRADOC who is the new director for the TRADOC operations unit at the Army’s Joint Training-Counter Improvised Explosive Device (IED) Operations Integration Center (JT-COIC) in Newport News, Va. The center helps prepare deployed U.S. troops and allies to combat IEDs. TRADOC runs a variety of training and education programs for soldiers.
While at TRADOC, Morris spearheaded a distance learning pilot program at CGSC. The program brought together on-site students and officials from non-governmental organizations to learn about sustained stability operations. The class of about 20 participants met last fall and spring and included on-site students and “some folks as far away as Africa and Iraq and some State Department folks,” Morris said.
The class was “like a video conference on steroids,” Morris said.
Working with a nonprofit group, the class incorporated online chat, video conferencing and audio lessons. Of course, the geograhic location of students presented no obstacles.
During the class, a Swedish military student was able to chime in that they had already done work in stability operations and then posted a report to the forum, Morris said.
“They tried to do some gaming and virtual worlds” by using avatars in the learning setting, but that did not work out as well, Morris said, mostly because the applications were too cumbersome to navigate during class.
Joseph C. Bebel, a retired Air Force colonel and assistant CGSC professor, taught the pilot class last fall and another professor taught his course in the spring.
“We are really ginning up a distance education directorate,” using Defense Connect online, Blackboard, smart boards and other electronic tools to boost distance learning. “What I am finding is simplicity should be the bottom line when you are using virtual technology,” Bebel said. “We only have so many hours to teach. You don’t want to get into a Catch-22 where you are teaching technology versus teaching the course material.”
Using the online forum to post assignments and slides worked well.
“We tried to encourage and use it as a chat or blog to discuss the lecture for the day. That never really caught on unfortunately,” Bebel said.
The online tools were better for providing details of the class throughout the course, but were not as useful for students participating at the same time as they would in a traditional class setting, the professor said. But connection problems with the NGOs and access to secure Internet connections were some of the biggest hiccups.
For now, the same class will be held in residence, with video conferencing and online chats used more for guest speakers, but other components will be used for separate courses geared toward distance learners, Bebel said.
Major Hope Gooch, an Army Reservist and logistics staff officer at Fort McPherson in Georgia, has been taking military education classes online for nearly two years. She said she likes seeing briefs and slides online and being able to chat with professors and students during an ongoing lecture.
“At first I thought getting online and all this business and being on there for three hours can be intensive,” Gooch said. “But because we were doing it collaboratively, it forced us to use the computer as a tool” for learning.
REACHING MORE STUDENTS
“What makes it particularly helpful is [that with technology] you can reach a larger audience of students,” the Army’s Morris said. “It moved from being a spot in time to a continual learning process.” Web 2.0 also transfers to the field. A squadron leader might have used 35 training aids in the field, but now with distance learning, soldiers can pull up updated information on a handheld device. At the JT-COIC, newer technology is used to train forces to combat IEDs. Army software specialists can take data from the field and create a video that will play on an iPhone or be distributed to schools, Morris said.
The Washington-based Marine Corps Institute, which started providing education to Marines in 1920, is using online technologies to boost military training for some 3,000 students a year, according to Kenneth Hess, director of MCI’s distance learning and technology.
The center hopes online distance learning tools will offset its reliance on printed coursework, along with the $2.5 million cost to ship printed coursework. Unlike textbooks, mission critical information can be updated in real-time with the Blackboard software, Hess said, but he cautioned: “We have to realize too that there are others who might not have accessibility. It is something that the Marine Corps and the DoD” have to be tuned in to because the “IT infrastructure is not necessarily designed to support an educational domain.”
Key challenges include allowing remote access, even for servicemembers who might be logging in from home without a common access card for secure access. Air Force Captain Ferrell agreed limited Internet connections often make distance learning a challenge.
“Most deployment locations operate using secure communications lines such as classified phones and computer systems,” Ferrell said. “These systems cannot access commercial or non-secure Websites, so access to commercial Internet lines is crucial for students.”
The Air Force’s main education center at Maxwell Air Force Base in Montgomery, Ala., also uses Blackboard for its distance learning programs. Approximately 100,000 students, including enlisted servicemembers, officers, civilians and international students, do some type of distance learning through the base’s Air University, according to Wayne Glass, a Blackboard program manager.
The university tech staff is able to imbed audio and video lectures into the software and podcasts for students. They also have technology that helps publish grades online and also a Blackboard tool to alert professors to plagiarism. The features allow professors to easily “develop engaging content and deliver that content in a quicker fashion. You can collaborate with fellow students in your course,” Glass said.
Patrick Devlin, Blackboard’s vice president of sales and market development, said Blackboard has more than 5,000 clients, and roughly 40 to 50 are DoD military and civilian clients.
“If anything, the military and the Department of Defense might even be a little ahead of the curve in terms of harnessing these tools to help boost online education,” Devlin said. “It is less theoretical with our Department of Defense clients. They are not playing around with technology. They are using technology [for their missions and programs]. When you can augment or lump traditional learning with a 24/7 virtual learning environment … you can go from more event-driven learning to more of a continuous lifelong learning model.”
IN THE FIELD
Clients have used blog technology as a way to update field manuals. “Video on demand is huge for people that are out in the field,” Devlin said. At the Air Force’s Air University, “they have guest speakers coming in—international heads of state or military leaders,” Devlin said. “All of that is captured and students can go online and view all of those things and go to discussion boards to post comments and blogs.”
Blackboard competitor Desire2Learn of Kitchener, Ontario, also has military clients. The company has a social networking-type tool that shows friends lists from classes and lets students swap and post class material, according to Ken Chapman, director of the company’s product strategy. The company has noticed its handful of military clients are “above and beyond and more cutting edge” than traditional educational clients, Chapman said. Connection issues might be the only catch. “I have worked with clients when submarines surface to get a satellite connection,” Chapman said. “That is when [students] would go in and submit copy.”
Oklahoma University, which has a large military student population, uses Desire2Learn software for its distance learning programs. YouTube videos are often integrated into course Websites as teaching tools, and professors blog and use social networking sites to work beyond the virtual classroom, said Robert Dougherty, director of IT for OU’s College of Liberal Studies. His department uses a high-definition DVD video camera to shoot and post interviews with faculty to enhance online coursework.
“We are looking at social networking, e-readers besides the Kindle” for students to be able to read course material from a phone or Blackberry and using Twitter to create a profile just for a specific class. The online learning experience is critical for military students who might not be able to take classes if they were not offered online. “The military is a place where we can really, really service people,” he said. ♦