ADL Initiative Recognized at Government

Learning Technology Symposium

Members of ADL Initiative’s team recently attended the Federal Government Distance Learning Association (FGDLA) Government Learning Technology Symposium at the Walter E. Washington Convention Center in Washington, D.C.  The event spanned two days and many leaders from the distributed learning community across the Department of Defense and Federal Government attended and presented.

The event offered learning and networking opportunities, and the ADL Initiative presented on multiple topics.

Dr. Shane Gallagher led a session on Wednesday, 7 December titled, “Is cognitive apprenticeship the way ahead for cybersecurity learning: Assessing pedagogical model of the Cyber Operators Academy Course.” Dr. Gallagher is a member of the research team developing and assessing the Cyber Operators Academy Course created by the Force Training Directorate.  He discussed the organization of the course, the knowledge students gained, and testing results following the course.

Dr. Sae Schatz opened day two on Thursday, 8 December with a dynamic presentation titled, “The Future Learning Ecosystem.”  It involved ADL Initiative’s vision of the future of learning and highlighted ADL Initiative’s work in building its technological backbone, the Total Learning Architecture (TLA), a collection of specifications for accessing and making use of learning-related data.

One part of the TLA is Experience API (xAPI).  Following Dr. Schatz’s presentation, Rob Chadwick led an xAPI Workshop where he provided a high-level overview of the open-source specification, the related tools ADL Initiative has available on GitHub, and live-coded a game enabled with xAPI tracking.

Dr. Schatz provided the keynote speech at the awards luncheon, highlighting what an exciting time it is to be a learning scientist and/or learning technologist. The ADL Initiative was also honored during this awards luncheon and accepted the FGDLA Innovation Award for our work on xAPI. Additionally, ADL Initiative’s Dr. Damon Regan accepted the FGDLA Pioneer Award which recognizes an “individual for demonstrating initiative and leadership in the development and implementation of distance learning in the Federal Government.”

We had a productive experience at the Government Learning Technology Symposium and were honored to be amongst this group of innovative, passionate individuals and organizations working on distributed learning in the government.