AN EDUCATION IN DISTANCE LEARNING


A NEW TWIST ON TRAINING


Sgt. Maj. of the Army Michael A. Grinston oversees 3rd Infantry Division Soldiers training with safety measures in place, such as the use of face coverings and physical distancing, at Fort Stewart, Georgia, in May. (Photo by Defense Media Activity – Army)


program at NPS for about 22 years. NPS was already well prepared for the shift to 100 percent distance learning when the pandemic hit, as they had been practic- ing that mode of education for a long time. “We’ve been conducting distance learn- ing for over 20 years,” Dillard said. “We started out with VTC [video teleconfer- encing]—you needed a phone line and had to herd all the students into a confer- ence room. It suffered from low bandwidth and frequent disconnections, but we still had confidence that live, synchronous, distributed education could work if we


could maintain vigorous dialogue as a component.”


Te distance learning courses at NPS have always been faculty-led and calendar- paced courses, which allows for more live interaction with the students and keeps them on track, Dillard said. Nowadays, using applications like Zoom and Micro- soft Teams, Dillard and his colleagues can execute synchronous education—teaching in real time—as well as using asynchro- nous courses, “flipping the classroom” with recorded lectures and independent


readings. But Dillard has recognized the same challenges at NPS that DAU is experiencing with distance learning— distraction, obstacles to engaging with the material and technology issues. He believes the student-centered learning approach will help mitigate those issues.


Student-centered learning puts the onus on the students, Dillard explained. Tey must take the content that is hand-picked for them by professors, consume and analyze it, and then connect that mate- rial with other readings, and synthesize


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Army AL&T Magazine


Summer 2020


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