The Advanced Distributed Learning Initiative Continues to Support the Royal Defence College as they Advance their Learning System

The ADL initiative’s Partnership Network is comprised of US-based government agencies, international military entities, and select US-based academic institutions that work collaboratively to conduct research, share learnings, and support implementation to encourage advancements in learning technology. Recently, the US ADL Initiative team had the opportunity to collaboratively exchange ideas with one of the Network’s members, the Royal Danish Defence College, as they continue to advance their learning ecosystem. The teams held a two-day working session during the week of the iFest 2022 conference in Alexandria, Virginia (15 and 19 August 2022).

“Our main focus was… understanding xAPI better and how we could use it in practice between our course management system and our learning platform in collaboration with your very talented employees…,”
– Allan Leander Øsstergreen, Royal Danish Defence College.

The workshop was divided into two segments: a theoretical overview of the Total Learning Architecture concept, and a practical hands-collaboration between two teams. During the first day of the workshop, the Danish team provided an overview of their latest developed training tools and technologies currently in use at the Danish Defence University and concluded with the USA ADL Initiative team providing a deep dive into TLA concepts, including xAPI and cmi5. This all laid the foundation for the in-depth, hands-on workshop on the second day when the teams collaboratively built out an architecture based on the requirements shared on day one. One of the areas of interest included search functionality performance (for example, were the search results satisfactory and led to students starting a new course, or not). Another high-interest topic was evaluating how well the instructors master the skill of building the ADL course/content, course performance quality, and course reception by the users.

“It was also a fun exercise to work with verbs and statements, which everyone contributed with good suggestions, “Østergreen shared. “All in all, it has been a really good experience to work together, and our IT department continues to work on the task here at home. However, we only expect to really implement xAPI in the Spring of 2023, when we upgrade our learning platform with a completely new core, which is more xAPI compatible than it is today. Thank you for a really good experience!” ADL continues to reach distributed learning communities beyond just the U.S. borders.