Case Study - Royal Navy

Is eLearning finally delivering the training revolution that it has promised for so long? The Defence College of Aeronautical Engineering is confident this is the case – the arrival of the Luminosity Product Suite, an innovative, end-user focused eLearning tool from CM Group, was the catalyst that tipped the balance… and here’s why.

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The Royal Naval Air Engineering and Survival School (RNAESS), part of the Defence College of Aeronautical Engineering (DCAE), is located at the HMS Sultan site at Gosport, Hampshire. Its primary role is to train all Engineering Officers and Ratings in the Mechanical, Avionics and Survival Equipment disciplines. Until recently, the theoretical elements of all courses taught in the classroom used the conventional instructor-led training (ILT) model. As part of the “tell, show and do” philosophy used by the DCAE, ILT worked well; course results, as well as external independent reviews, were very good. However, the DCAE wanted to further improve its educational effectiveness while making better use of instructors’ and students’ time. So for some time it has been investigating the option of using a blended learning approach – eLearning in combination with ILT.

The DCAE envisaged that with the right eLearning solution, it could achieve its goals on two levels. Firstly, eLearning would make the training process more flexible within the classroom and secondly, it would extend the learning process outside the classroom. In the classroom, the instructor would be able to use eLearning materials as teaching aids by using intelligent whiteboards to provide an open, interactive group experience. Use of a range of media types would be used to enhance the student’s learning experience. Outside the classroom, eLearning content could be used at several levels, such as:

• Preparation material that students would complete before their attendance on the course.
• Material that students attending the course could use in the evening to review what was covered during the day.
• Post course revision for students when they have left the College and are on deployment around the world.
• Updates to communicate changing procedures and processes quickly and effectively to former students.

The infrastructure for access to eLearning courses outside the HMS Sultan site would be provided through the Defence Learning Portal learning management system (LMS), which is accessible over the Internet.

The DCAE reviewed and evaluated several commercial eLearning authoring solutions during the latter part of last year. However, it became apparent that there was a major obstacle to overcome; most eLearning products that were used to design and create courses required a specialist, IT-skilled team to be able to use them – or an extensive training period for the would be authors. In that case, the DCAE would have to involve an external organisation in the course creation process which would result in longer development times and increased development costs. Furthermore, updates to existing courses would need to go through the same lengthy process resulting in less frequent updates which would impact the quality and validity of courses.

The turning point for the DCAE was when it evaluated Luminosity, an eLearning environment from CM Group.

For the past ten years, CM Group has been developing training courses in both ILT and eLearning formats for organisations such as Microsoft and Intel as well as other large international businesses.

Luminosity addressed the issues facing both the DCAE and the industry in general. In a nutshell, Luminosity provided the ability to create engaging eLearning courses without any IT technical skills. For the DCAE‘s trainers and subject matter experts, this meant that they could directly create and update their own course materials. The product enables training materials to be created on a wide variety of areas ranging from procedural and policy training, to technical theory and even software simulations.

Luminosity’s graphical user interface makes it easy to construct content through an extensive set of standard (and fully customisable) authoring page templates. Each page template contains a series of components that may include text, images, video, simulations and assessments. The author simply selects the required template and then clicks to insert media assets and types the text directly into the course. The whole process is quick and surprisingly easy.

An important point for the DCAE was that all of the images and media in each project are stored centrally on DCAE’s own Luminosity Server. This means that they can be reused across multiple courses to provide consistency and also to reduce cost.

Lt Cdr Adrian Coulthard, Specialist Training Group Officer, said:

“A prime driver in our selection process for eLearning software has been that it is easy for non–IT specialists to use. Our trainers can very quickly master the tool and then focus on creating high-quality courses that augment and extend our existing training programmes.”

Luminosity also makes it easy for authors, or other team members such as reviewers or copy editors, to work collaboratively on the same course independently of their physical location. For example, two or more subject matter experts can be located on different RN bases or anywhere in the world, and can check out pages or sections of a course and work on them independently with Luminosity managing the process. Collaborative working was important to the DCAE and this was not a feature that was convincingly offered by other eLearning vendors.

Lt Toby Barnard, Avionics Section Officer, added:

“Collaborative features provide a powerful infrastructure, enabling co-operation and review. The course creation, publishing and update processes are necessarily fast so that they suddenly enable a dramatic increase in eLearning output. It’s also important that we have access to people who have years of experience in actually designing and creating eLearning.”

Courses created by Luminosity are automatically SCORM-compliant. Therefore, they are compatible with, and can be uploaded to, any SCORM compliant learning management system including the Defence Learning Portal. This means that there is the potential to track who has completed a course, what pages have been viewed and the results of any assessments that the individual has taken.

Following the successful evaluation of Luminosity against alternative products earlier this year, the DCAE is now using Luminosity in earnest to build and develop its eLearning portfolio. It has a dedicated course development environment for its trainers to use to create eLearning courses, which includes PC workstations with Luminosity installed, as well as scanners and video cameras. There are also plans to adopt the same eLearning approach at other DCAE training establishments.

A further enhancement that the DCAE is looking to introduce is to use handheld mobile devices to enable personnel in the field to conveniently access eLearning content. Luminosity is designed to support multiple output devices and formats. Therefore, after a course has been created, it can be published out to multiple delivery devices. Cleverly, the content is automatically reformatted to present it in the optimum way for each device. Alternatively, a course can be output as a rolling presentation in a podcast format.

The success of the DCAE’s blended learning vision and specifically its in-house eLearning authoring implementation, clearly illustrates that eLearning has taken an important step forward, one that offers all training establishments, military or otherwise some powerful and flexible new ways to significantly enhance their training approach.

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