Competency-Based Learning

2019; Smith, Brent; Gordon, Jerry; Hernandez, Mike

Military education and training encompass many different schools, universities, and training programs designed to foster technical, professional, and leadership skills in military service members. Historically, there has been a separation between the education and training communities across the services. Education occurs incrementally and involves grappling with ambiguity while thinking and reflecting about the concepts being learned. Training is linked to readiness and offers opportunities to apply an individual's knowledge, skills, and abilities in a manner that provides immediate feedback and progress measurement. Within the current context, training and education also have different reporting structures, motivations, and logistical requirements such as fuel, personnel, and the access to the appropriate environments or equipment.

Future warfighters must rapidly prepare and adapt to function in an increasingly volatile and complex environment. Where current assessment methods judge knowledge retention for education and skill proficiency for training, there is a significant gap between those metrics and operational readiness and performance. Future force management and readiness metrics must directly link preparations to operations. The class of metrics used to do this is referred to as competencies – a measure of how well someone can use their acquired skills and knowledge to complete task(s). To enable the future learning ecosystems, all the ways to assess the ability of a person will need a digital representation. The on-going research on Experience API (xAPI) provides the capability to capture any transaction of learning. The Advanced Distributed Learning Initiative (ADL) is continuing to explore how those xAPI transactions can be trusted as evidence from an authoritative source.

Contract: W900KK-17-D-0004

DTIC: 1077111

Download Publication