Tools of the Trade

Written by Kenya McCullum

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AUTHORING TOOLS PLAY A
PART IN MILITARY LEARNING.

Many of the courses that are used to train military personnel rely on authoring tools, or software applications that facilitate the development of training materials. These tools, which can be desktop or Web-based applications, are useful because they allow instructional designers to update the content of a class without completely reinventing the pedagogical wheel. Instead of a whole team of programmers rewriting the codes for an entire course from scratch, authoring tools allow instructional designers to input only the parts of the course that need to be changed— either based on new information or updated training requirements. Also, instructional designers can use authoring tools to create a new course from the content of existing classes, picking and choosing what information is appropriate and pasting it all together.

There are many authoring tools used by the military to create various kinds of content—such as traditional courses, e-learning courses and virtual reality simulations. Some tools are designed specifically for the purpose of instructional design, while others were designed with alternative uses in mind.

“There are many tools that are not necessarily designed for the creation of e-learning specifically,” said Peter Berking, lead instructional designer at the Advanced Distributed Learning (ADL) program. The program remains responsible for developing and implementing learning technologies throughout the Department of Defense. “Some are promoted for creating Web pages or animations in general, but when they are used for e-learning, they are referred to as authoring tools.”

Examples of these types of authoring tools are products manufactured by Adobe Systems Inc., such as Dreamweaver, Flash and Authorware.

REQUIREMENTS FOR AUTHORING TOOLS

All authoring tools used by the military must adhere to the Shareable Content Object Reference Model, or SCORM. In order to be SCORM conformant, an authoring tool must create content that can be shared by other learning management systems. This requirement was created in response to the fact that there were too many different tools creating content, which made it difficult for similar course information to be shared throughout the military. SCORM is a step in the direction of more standardization in training throughout the DoD, and although all courses will not necessarily have the same look and feel to them, they can still be easily changed as needed.

“If you think of the car industry, when a part on your car breaks you can go to any parts store because there are industry standards and specifications for the parts,” said Jake Aplanalp, a program manager at the Naval Air Warfare Training Systems Division. “Training content wasn’t that way, and SCORM is an effort to make it so you don’t always have to go back to the person that built the training content for you in the first place—you are able to go to many different people to update it.”

Another requirement that authoring tools must meet is Section 508 accessibility. Section 508 is part of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, which calls for federal agencies to develop electronic and information technologies that are accessible to employees with disabilities. An example of how this affects authoring tools is when multimedia training content is involved, such as audio and video. In these cases, the content must also have a text alternative for users who blind or visually impaired. However, this standard does not apply when it causes an undo burden on an organization in the government—such as one that does not have employees with disabilities.

With SCORM and Section 508, there is still a lot of room for differences among the many authoring tools that the military uses, but further standardization may not be wise. Although it may make financial sense—it might actually stifle training capabilities.

“You don’t want to constrain and standardize training so much that you can’t allow for unique requirements to be accounted for,” said Aplanalp. “There’s a sweet spot in the middle that we need to work toward.”

On the other hand, there are instances where further standardization can directly improve training. Captain Hank Reeves of the Naval Education and Training Command said that a more standardized procedure for administering student assessments would help trainers determine if the training process is actually effective. Because they want to have the right sailor at the right place with the right skills, Reeves said a standard assessment process would allow the military to isolate training— ensuring that soldiers know what they need to know to perform their missions and that they are not repeating training on skills that they’ve already mastered.

AUTHORING TOOL INNOVATIONS

DoD is currently exploring several innovations in authoring tools to further enhance training, including:

Separation of content and appearance. Tools that have the ability to separate content and appearance allow the flexibility to update the text of a course without the need to recode the screens it appears on. This also allows the course’s skins—interface visual designs—to be easily swapped without having to change the text itself. Use of templates. Although templates have always been an element of authoring tools, they are becoming much more emphasized for future use. “The use of templates is an easy way to enforce universal standards across an organization and can make the authoring process much simpler—such as by authors just populating a template rather than engineering the whole screen,” said Berking.

Learning object-centric architecture. This type of functionality gives instructional designers the freedom to assemble and reassemble learning objects to be used for different courses.

TYPES OF AUTHORING TOOLS

DoD uses authoring tools that are either government owned or commercial products. Among the government owned products is the Authoring Instructional Materials (AIM) program, which was developed by Columbus Technologies, a California-based company that has been supplying AIM to the military since 1991. When the tool was first introduced, it was a UNIX Oracle database application with a text-based interface, and it has evolved into the Windows desk application that is used today.

AIM is a user-friendly authoring tool that walks instructional designers through steps as they create content. When users have created the learning objectives for the course they’re working on, they can click on a few buttons and the program will guide them and prompt them to input data. This allows the military to build large chunks of data in the tool and update only the relevant parts as learning objectives change.

A commercial authoring tool being used by the military is the Vcommunicator Authoring Suite, which includes Vcommunicator Studio, Gesture Builder, and Vcommunicator Mobile. Manufactured by Vcom3D Inc., these tools leverage the study of nonverbal communication to create content and were first developed for members of the deaf and hard of hearing community learning sign language. These authoring tools are now used by DoD in order to help servicemembers with the gestures and language they need to know while serving in Iraq or Afghanistan. Service men and women use these products to watch and listen to lifelike avatars that pronounce Arabic words and demonstrate cultural gestures in order to prepare them for their missions. This content can be easily uploaded to an iPod, and the military can produce new words and gestures in the program as needed. This realistic content gives users a full cultural package so that operators can communicate both verbally and gesturally while conducting kinetic and nonkinetic missions. ♦

For more information, contact MT2 Editor Marty Kauchak or search our online archives for related stories.