awards case study
Marnie Threapleton explains how the British Army leveraged the power and accessibility of mobile devices for compliance training deployment
Weapon of choice A
s ‘millennial’ learners have joined the ranks of the British Army, so its traditional methods of training soldiers have come
in for a radical shake-up. In deploying a learning solution to cater for its new recruits and to make its training more effective, the Army wanted to leverage the power and the accessibility of smartphone devices.
Gold in the E-Learning Awards 2012 Best Use of Mobile Learning Category went to the British Army in partnership with Intuition for producing learning apps that allow soldiers to learn wherever they are by using their own smartphones.
The objectives Every year Britain’s 90,000 soldiers have to pass military annual training tests (MATTs), a suite that includes battlefield casualty drills, equality and diversity, law of armed conflict, security awareness and personal fitness. In deciding to make MATTs training mobile, the Army wanted to establish best training practice, find an affordable solution, and evaluate the mobile case generally – the ease with which learning materials can be deployed via mobile devices, and whether soldiers have an appetite for learning through mobile devices.
The barriers to success As the MATTs curriculum covered so many different subjects, there was no single subject matter expert (SME). What’s more, SMEs changed throughout the project
so that three versions of storyboards were eventually required so the learning elements could be pre-visualised.
Security was another big consideration, with the sheer portability of mobile devices meaning an inherent risk of loss with the devices. There was also some resistance to the idea of
learning using mobile devices, particularly from longer-service soldiers. Traditionally training in the Army has been hands-on, via simulations, or in classrooms. Mobile learning challenged the whole culture of centralised classroom delivery. The real challenge for the implementers, though, was convincing Army trainers and the diverse SMEs based in many different Army units of the merits of mobile learning. A neat contrast in smartphone ownership data provided by ArmyNet surveys in 2010/11 reveals the nature of the problem: 77% of 8,000 soldiers surveyed said they owned a smartphone but only 30% of 100 Army trainers said they owned one.
The solution One of this project’s strengths was its end-user focus – the soldier. This approach helped the team to eliminate the typical thorn in the side of m-learning implementations – the wide variation in learners’ own personal technologies. Research by Towards Maturity reveals that 50% of organisations cite this as a real barrier to implementation, with over one-third of organisations overcoming the problem by providing mobile devices that they know are compatible with their IT architecture. A survey conducted prior to the Army project showed that iOS and Android devices were by far the most widely used by soldiers, so the implementation team designed the course specifically for them. They decided to adapt the traditional classroom-based MATTs for a mobile alternative that included interactive games, simulations, video, aide-memoire performance support apps and HTML-based content. Each element would be fully tracked using SCORM (Sharable Content
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e.learning age october 2013
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