Do we do a good job creating courseware and is it all necessary?

I was a trainer for many different courses, from unit skills to leadership and all-forces schools. It is just like college (I have 2 degrees). There is the course title, the books, the instructor experience, and the application when you go to the new job or unit. Also the times and missions change quickly and keeping up with change can be a challenge.

In todays information centric world it’s likely that the examples, illustrations, and statistics will be out of date by the time courseware makes it through the development, approval, and fielding process. I worked with both the Army and Air Force learning development processes. Neither were very fast. In many cases it’s the approval process that takes too much time to work through too many layers of command.

A company I worked for had a contract to develop computer based training for new equipment for weighing 463L pallets. Working with our sponsor we got the tech manuals and access to the equipment, pallets and dummy cargo. We wrote a script for the training and got our talent to practice using the equipment and talking. That took a couple of months. Then we filmed the presentation. Next the training technology folks put together the text and graphics to go with the live presentation. Finally we added some cheesey music. The product was about a 45 min class that would run on a desktop computer. Then the approval process started. The Air Force process took about 6 months with several changes and updates. Once three Air Force commands signed off, the presentation went to the Army for more reviews and approvals. Another 6 months went by with more changes. Finally the Air Force and Army agreed and the training was fielded over a 3 month period.