• Promote widespread collaboration.
• Exploit Internet technologies.
• Develop next generation learning technologies.
• Create reusable content, and lower costs, with object-based tools.

Overview

Objectives of the ADL Initiative

Background

Working Groups

Overview

Background: In November 1997, the Department of Defense and the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) launched the Advanced Distributed Learning (ADL) initiative. A major collaborative ADL partner and presentor at the Kick-Off Meeting is the Instructional Management Systems (IMS) Project sponsored by EDUCAUSE. This project is developing an open architecture for online learning. While other ADL activities are focused on instructional content development and delivery using current and emerging technologies, the IMS project focuses on next-generation open architecture for online learning. Other presentors at the Kick-Off Meeting included government and industry representatives of Apple, General Motors, Microsoft, and Teknowledge.

Purpose: The purpose of the ADL initiative is to ensure access to high-quality education and training materials that can be tailored to individual learner needs and can be made available whenever and wherever they are required.

This initiative is designed to accelerate large-scale development of dynamic and cost-effective learning software and to stimulate an efficient market for these products in order to meet the education and training needs of the military and the nation's workforce in the 21^st century. It will do this through the development of a common technical framework for computer and net-based learning that will foster the creation of re-usable learning content as "instructional objects."

Common Guidelines: The Defense Department is taking steps to establish a cost-effective distributed learning environment that is consistent across the military Services and all other DoD components. Many university and business training organizations have similar interests. DoD and other federal agencies want to make use of specifications representing best commercial practice. In order to facilitate the development of specifications that meet the interests of all participants, ADL will ensure that a common set of guidelines for this new object-oriented learning environment is developed through active collaboration with the private sector, where many of the innovations in network technology and software design are taking place.

Collaborative Effort: ADL partnerships between the federal government, private-sector technology suppliers, and the broader education and training community will be the means for formulating voluntary guidelines that will meet common needs. By making learning software accessible, interoperable, durable, and reusable, the ADL initiative will ensure that academic, business, and government users of learning software gain the best possible value from the materials they purchase.

Outcome Metrics: Success of the ADL initiative will be measured by the extent to which: (a) consumers are able to purchase high-quality learning software less expensively than they do today; (b) the size of the learning software market increases; and (c) producers of learning software are able to achieve a higher return on their investments.

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• Develop guidelines needed for large-scale development and implementation of efficient and effective distributed learning.
• Identify and promote business models and economic incentives that serve the needs of both consumers and providers of distributed learning.
• Establish a rapidly growing networked community of education and training consumers.
• Stimulate large-scale collaborative developments by organizations that share learning requirements.
• Identify technical challenges that exceed the current state-of-the-art, and initiate collaborative research and development programs to overcome those challenges.
• Share lessons learned and accelerate the development of a robust and highly diverse object-oriented open environment for Advanced Distributed Learning.

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Background

Computer-based training materials are largely developed on a proprietary, company-by-company basis, resulting in high development costs and limited re-sale value. American companies alone spend billions of dollars a year on the development of training products, with little of the investment focused on re-sale or external product development. By developing guidelines, the ADL initiative seeks to create new markets for training materials, reduce the cost of development, and increase the potential return on investment.

Object Technology: A review of software industry trends indicates that many companies now believe that an object-based approach will provide the basis for platform neutrality and software reusability needed for the large-scale development and dissemination of powerful and cost-effective learning content. Platform neutrality and software reusability are considered essential for the sustained investments necessary to create the kind of dynamic ADL environment that is needed to meet the education and training needs of a 21^st century military and national workforce.

Platform Neutrality: There is an emerging consensus that specifications for new platform-neutral techniques are sufficiently mature to justify investment in next-generation applications. While it is understood that more innovation is needed in the education and training domain, it appears that the development of a robust object-based and platform-neutral environment for distributed learning will become practical and feasible over the next 2-5 years.

Forum: The ADL initiative will provide a forum for exercising and assessing a variety of technical approaches for producing instructional objects that meet the needs of the ADL partners. Results will then form the basis for an initial set of ADL guidelines.

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Working Groups

Four collaborative working groups are established to develop requirements and identify issues for submission to the IMS Project and other ADL associated groups. Each ADL Working Group solicits a small team of volunteers to gather, review, and prepare requirements and issues for their working group. These issues and requirements will continue to be refined through the first release of IMS specifications. ADL collaborative forum members will then be invited to participate in test implementations within their domain of interest.

Content Advocacy Group. This group will develop functional requirements for education and training objects in subject matter domains. This group will develop a collaborative process to identify and prioritize functional requirements and communicate them to the IMS and other ADL working groups. This group will also subdivide into sectors organized around learning content areas and begin to identify opportunities for collaboration with other ADL partners who share common education and training requirements.

Business Market Group. This group will define the business requirements for an efficient market in instructional objects. The group will identify non-technical impediments to the growth of a market for object-based learning resources and recommend solutions and strategies for resolving these impediments. It will also be asked to recommend actions needed to ensure the protection of intellectual property rights, to provide "metadata" adequate to support these actions, and to minimize the costs of buying and selling software components.

Technical Solutions Group. This group will identify common technical requirements for software needed to cultivate the vigorous market for interoperable, reusable software objects. A major activity of this group is to identify ways to ensure compatibility across platforms, enable instructional objects to communicate with each other, and resolve other technical issues that will arise as the ADL initiative progresses.

Research Priorities Group. This group will identify and describe gaps between capabilities needed by the IMS and ADL initiatives and those now in the state of the art. The group will then prioritize development of the missing capabilities on the basis of urgency, impact on the state of the art, and likely success of research and development efforts to produce them.

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