Atlantis Learning Community Executive Summary

Initiative

Provide the best flexible, lifelong learning platform through the use of 21st Century technologies.

Mission

• Encourage collaboration
• Facilitate interoperability
• Promote best practices for using distributed learning
• Provide the highest-quality education, training, & informal learning
• Tailored to individual needs
• Delivered cost-effectively, anytime and anywhere.

Activities

Four broad Activities:

• Thought Leadership: serve as a leader for forward-looking distributed learning topics within the community. Thought leadership involves the curation (i.e., collection, validation, synthesis, maintenance, and dissemination) of relevant requirements, emerging targets of opportunity, corresponding strategic roadmaps, and associated policy guidance. Effective thought leadership also includes the cultivation of stakeholder buy-in for the advocated strategies, plans, and policies.
• R&D Innovation: strive to develop the next-generation of distributed learning science techniques and technologies via research, development, and collaboration.  Develop and assess advanced distributed learning prototypes that enable more effective, efficient, and affordable learner-centric lifelong learning. These R&D activities span six technical areas: 1) e-learning, 2) mobile learning, 3) learning theory, 4) web-based virtual worlds, games and simulations, 5) learning analytics and 6) performance modeling, and interoperability infrastructure.
• Outreach and Transition: Work closely with other learning communities to help them implement effective, coordinated advanced distributed learning solutions.
• Develop the standards, tools, and learning content for the future learning environment.

Our vision is to harness the power of the Internet and other virtual or private wide-area networks (WANs) to deliver high-quality learning.

We want to bring together intelligent tutors, distributed subject matter experts, real-time in-depth learning management, and a diverse array of support tools to ensure a responsive, high-quality “learner-centric” system.

The advanced distributed learning strategy requires re-engineering the learning paradigm from a “classroom-centric” model to an increasingly “learner-centric” model, and re-engineering the learning business process from a “factory model” (involving mainly large education and training institutions) to a more network-centric “information-age model” which incorporates anytime-anywhere learning (DoD Strategic Plan for ADL, 1999).

ALC strategy is pursuit of emerging network-based technologies, creation of common standards to enable reuse and interoperability of learning content, lowering of development costs, widespread promotion of collaboration to satisfy common needs, enhancing performance with next-generation learning technologies, working closely with industry to influence the commercial product development cycles, establishing coordinated implementation processes, and ultimately delivering efficient and effective high-quality learning continuously to the Community anytime/anywhere.

ALC’s intent is to establish learning that is: 1) accessible (anytime/anywhere), 2) interoperable (across developers and technical platforms), 3) durable (does not require redesign when technology changes), and 4) cost-effective (significantly increases learning effectiveness while reducing time, costs, and duplications of effort).

These aims will be achieved by taking five actions.

1. Influence the development/use of common industry standards
2. Enable acquisition of interoperable tools and content
3. Create a robust and dynamic network infrastructure for distribution
4. Enable the modernization of supporting resources
5. Engender cultural change to move from a “classroom-centric” to a “learner-centric” model

The ALC is designed to leverage the full power of communications, information, and learning technologies—through the use of collaboratively developed common standard.

• The challenge to teachers is to understand and apply the new technologies in concert with, in addition to, or in some cases in place of, traditional learning methods.
• The challenge to developers is to design methods of instruction and content that are open-architecture, shareable, high quality, and cost effective.
• The challenge to the information technology sector is to field an infrastructure that supports anytime, anywhere learning with appropriate bandwidth, transaction security, and robustness that is transparent to the learner.

These are not easy challenges. They require unprecedented collaboration and consensus building.

We have the tools and we have the will, so now we just need to do it!