September 18, 2007

Implementation Fest, the Joint Advanced Distributed Learning (JADL) Co-Laboratory’s annual conference, brought together military, industry and academic professionals to discuss the new capabilities supporting the United States Armed Forces’ internet-based learning needs. The conference; held 28 August through 30 August at the Rosen Centre Hotel in Orlando, Florida., is the Department of Defense’s (DoD) premier event for the distributed-learning community.

“It’s the collaboration, the discussions, the ‘oh, I didn’t know you were doing that’ that takes place here which is very hard to replicate in distributed learning,” said Jean Burmester, Director of the Joint ADL Co-Laboratory in Orlando, Florida. “You, the services and the contractors, are making significant progress in distributed learning. It’s the innovation, the quality of training and education, and the tracking of the training that are making this success possible.”

The yearly event, hosted by the Orlando-based Joint ADL Co-Laboratory in cooperation with the National Defense Industrial Association, provides an in-depth analysis of the state-of-affairs surrounding the military’s internet-based instructional tools. It also highlights the significant challenges facing our military around the globe and how to provide distributed learning anytime and anywhere.

In addition to the conference's overall distributed-learning theme, three military officers who recently returned from combat shared their insights on the quality of training and education they received before and during their deployments.

“The training that I’ve gone through and the training that we bring to the fight to enable the Iraqis is vital,” said U.S. Coast Guard Lt. j.g. Joseph Vermette, whose unit was responsible for training 2,000 Iraqi troops to protect their oil platforms. “Traditional training facilities are not available, so computer-based training is essential.”

Another Warfighter offered his insight to the distributed learning community:

“A Soldier can make time for training and in fact, it’s something they lust for,” said Army Sgt. 1st Class Gregg Ramsdell. “Duty, honor, country-those are three words they live by and training helps them to fulfill those words.”

The final presenter in the Warfighters’ portion of the conference concurred with Ramsdell. “You have troops that are eager to learn because they want to know they are giving 200 percent to the fight,” said Army Sgt. 1st Class Richard Colon.

In addition to the Warfighters’ presentations, senior officials from the Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD), including Dan Gardner, director of Readiness and Training, addressed the ADL stakeholders to provide an update of OSD’s perspective on distributed learning.

“We’ve certainly come a long way. It’s really getting exciting now and our community demands [distributed learning]. We still have a way to go to reach seamless and integrated solutions. We want to replicate that battlefield, replicate that theater of operation as realistic as we can in an integrated fashion before [the Warfighters] have to deploy,” Gardner said.