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An important component of the U.S. National Defense Strategy is the modernization of DoD’s education and training systems—through the development of new technologies, advances in learning science, and implementation of new policies and business practices. To lay the strategic foundation...

The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) professional standards association is on track to release the Experience Application Programming Interface (xAPI) version 2.0 as an international standard within the next six months. Recognizing xAPI as a global data standard...

iFEST 2021 focused on the growing imperative for education and training innovation, including data-centric reforms needed to create a DoD-wide interoperable learning ecosystem. Over 525 participants joined the virtual discussion to learn from policymakers, senior military officials, and technology leaders...

The cmi5 specification was created by the Aviation Industry Computer-Based Training Committee (AICC) and the Advanced Distributed Learning (ADL) Initiative to provide an alternative to the Shareable Content Object Reference Model (SCORM) set of specifications.

iFEST 2021, the premier annual event for showcasing the latest distributed learning science and technology, will be held 31 August to 2 September 2021. In addition to deep-dive discussions with leaders from military agencies, industry, and academia, iFEST 2021 features...

The ADL Initiative is chairing the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) Learning Technology Standards Committee (LTSC) study group for Enterprise Learner Records. The new data standard, numbered IEEE P2997, will harmonize the structure of learner record metadata generated...

The ADL Initiative, working with stakeholders from government, industry, and academia, has established a set of baseline requirements that will allow DoD e-learning content developers to design courses that are instrumented to collect greater amounts of learner performance data. These...

Contemporary digital learning technologies generate, store, and share terabytes of learner data—which must flow seamlessly and securely across systems. To enable interoperability and ensure systems can perform at-scale, the ADL Initiative is developing the Data and Training Analytics Simulated Input...

Across DoD and the broader education and training community, organizations use many different and often incompatible methods to publish and describe their courses, learning activities, and instructional resources. This results in hundreds of proprietary and unconnected catalog descriptions, causing a...

The ADL Initiative recently released a feature update for the Competency and Skills System (CaSS) application to better support competency authoring. The authoring tools use the new CaSS plug-in architecture to allow users to create, import, and edit competency frameworks....

Since its inception, DAU has expertly trained and certified government acquisition professionals, and recently has embarked on transformative changes to its learning infrastructure and data systems. In support of these modernization efforts, DAU and the ADL Initiative have partnered around...

The ADL Initiative’s Enterprise Course Catalog project has completed its next iteration of requirements discovery and is moving toward prototype testing. The project will provide a globally searchable directory of DoD course listings by automatically pulling metadata from local catalogs...

Across the world, 2020 was filled with unprecedented challenges, but from crisis came opportunities—opportunities to reinvent the reputation, agility, and purpose of distributed learning. Across the Department of Defense and beyond, organizations accelerated and expanded their efforts by orders of...

As the new Personalized eBooks for Learning (PeBL) platform grows in popularity, the ADL Initiative is taking steps to broaden its accessibility, functionality, and security for DoD uses.

This month, the Maturing ADL in Exercises (MADLx) project supported the Joint Headquarters exercise, conducted at the Ivan Cherniakhovskyi National Defence University of Ukraine. MADLx is using this exercise and others to validate digital learning tools and techniques, and the...

The ADL Initiative has completed an alpha version of its new xAPI Profile Server and plans to release a forthcoming beta version for user testing in the second quarter of 2021. This web-based application will support the authoring, management, and...

How many different usernames and passwords do you keep track of? Data-driven services like banking, social media, mobile apps, and online subscriptions have become ubiquitous in our everyday lives. Since the dawn of computing, our usernames have been our “identities,”...

This year’s Interservice/Industry Training, Simulation and Education Conference (I/ITSEC), the world’s largest modeling, simulation, and training event, has switched to an online format. The virtual I/ITSEC, now called vIITSEC, will be held from 30 November to 04 December, with the...

The iFEST conference is an annual milestone for tracking the development of science, technologies, and policies for distributed learning. In 2020, amid a pandemic-driven global expansion of online collaboration, iFEST became an affirmation of the new distributed learning reality.

The transformation toward digital education and training is a global phenomenon. In Eastern Europe this transformation is powered by a collaboration among multiple military, commercial, and academic organizations, with Romania among the leaders in the field. Since 2004, Romania has...