Introduction
Information technology (IT) touches nearly every aspect of our lives. One area in which IT has had a particularly profound impact is higher education. At the U.S. Air Force Air War College (AWC), part of Air University (AU), the integration of IT into a graduate-level curriculum focused on strategic military studies has proven to be challenging.
The 10-month master's level degree program consists of a core curriculum encompassing: strategy; doctrine and air power; warfighting and the study of future conflicts; national security decision making; international security studies; leadership and ethics and diverse elective courses. The fulfillment of the AWC mission, which is: to educate senior officers and civilians working for the federal government to lead at the strategic level in the employment of aerospace forces, including joint, combined, and coalition operations, in support of national security, presents a dual challenge—academic education and professional development.
To meet these challenges, the college strives to develop in its students the knowledge, skills, and attitudes necessary to be strategic leaders in the profession of arms. As the senior Air Force professional military education (PME) institution, the AWC has an annual enrollment of approximately 265 resident and 3,500 nonresident students, representing the U.S. military, several federal agencies, and 45 foreign nations. The average student has 20 years of professional service, many with a graduate degree from a civilian institution, and a large percentage who have commanded at the O-5 level.
While integrating IT into this unique educational environment is challenging, we share many of the same challenges as other institutions.1 Questions such as, "What do we hope to accomplish with IT at the college?" and "How do we decide what we need?" are similar to the IT questions being asked at many colleges and universities across the country. In 1996, the first AWC IT Strategic Plan was published. This document outlined IT goals and objectives over a five-year period, and emphasized several major points: (1) The need for a central IT focal point for the college; 2() The need for a regular IT upgrade and replacement schedule; (3) The need to provide students with access to state-of-the-art IT throughout their academic program.
The initial IT plan accomplished these objectives by establishing a corporate planning and integration group within the college to develop IT requirements, and a replacement schedule for hardware and software. A considerable effort also went into exploiting the potential that IT provides for research, archival, and import of Web-based information. The AWC Internet Gateway at http://www.au.af.mil/au/awc/awcgate/awcgate.htm was developed in 1997 for conducting Web-based research. It contains not only links to over 20,000 files from the Air Force, Department of Defense (DoD), industry, academic, international military community, and media sites.
It is consistently at the top of search engine "relevancy" lists for numerous military topics, but while initiatives were impressive, the college was consistently unable to secure adequate funding for IT, instead we were forced to rely on reprogramming end-of-fiscal-year funds to purchase needed equipment. The strategic plan was missing a way to do the planning, project prioritization, and budgetary inputs-- all needed to avoid inappropriate technology purchases. To respond to this need a concept model was developed. The planning tool includes the short-term (zero to three years) and long-term (three to eight years) visions for incorporating IT into both the resident and non resident student programs.
A Concept Model for IT Planning and Integration
The AWC IT concept model is built around what we consider to be the cornerstones of Senior Service School education--the faculty, staff, and students. The locations of these entities at opposing ends of the model diagram serve a specific purpose--actions by the faculty and staff should drive similar actions from the students. The following are three primary components of the education process: (1) Curriculum development--our goal is to develop and deliver a quality, accredited curriculum to enhance student understanding at the strategic level of leadership. We apply IT to enhance the curriculum, and also include IT topics as part of the curriculum. On the student side of the model, we apply IT not only to enhance their understanding of a topic, but also to allow the students to learn IT basics and how to leverage IT in their future assignments.
The students' responses to the faculty IT goals are important because the reflective aspect of the IT model focuses our attention on relevant applications of technology, thus helping us avoid the "technology for technology's sake" trap; (2) Faculty/staff and student development-–our goal is to create an environment in which we can properly prepare, train, and support our faculty and students; (3) Institutional development--the college extends itself beyond its walls to reach out to the rest of the Air Force, the DoD, academia, industry, and the international community. It also encourages students to maintain their professional ties to the institution throughout their careers, which also benefits the faculty.
They are the two equally important environments in which students learn: (1) The learning environment—within the walls of the college occurs through seminars; courses; the Distinguished Lecture program; wargames and exercises; and research and writing programs. IT is integrated throughout each of these areas. (2) The application environment—the world outside the college is where much of our outreach is accomplished not only through applications such as the AWC Internet Gateway, but also through faculty participation in professional conferences and other types of professional dialogue.
Applying the Concept Model
The following is an example of an IT initiative from Academic Year (AY) 2000-2001 executed before the concept model was created, to show how the concept model was applied as refinements were made during the planning for the current academic year. In AY 2000-2001, the entire content of the Joint Force Employment (JFE) course was put on the AWC local area network (LAN). This was the first time that an entire course was online without hardcopy materials given to students. There were several reasons to go online, the most important was to provide current articles for students. This objective was accomplished—the percentage of current reading material jumped from less than one-third of the total readings in AY 1999-2000 to nearly one-half in AY 2000-2001.
Enhancements were added to some of the material using a program known as the Joint Multidimensional Education and Analysis System (JMEANS), a multimedia family of tools, applications and information-sharing approaches that centers around AU's education mission. The course format shifted from a Service-oriented perspective to an "issues-oriented" one that was centered on discussion topics from the Air Force Chief of Staff Global Engagement policy-level wargame series. The Global Engagement series is the Air Force Chief of Staff Title X wargame exploring aerospace contributions to joint warfighting through futuristic scenarios.
The myriad changes to the JFE course resulted in "growing pains" that were evidenced by student concerns, which were addressed by the faculty in working group sessions. While there were concerns about the format and the online curriculum, I will just focus on the IT aspects. The following issues surfaced: (1) Concerns that the final exam may be difficult to study for without hardcopies of all assigned readings, including the National Security strategy, Joint Chief of Staff pubs, etc.; (2) Software problems accessing and manipulating Adobe Acrobat Portable Document Files (PDFs); (3) The AWC LAN was not accessible from outside the college; 4) Insufficient memory in students' older laptop computers to store the entire curriculum. Some students also stated the small screens caused eye fatigue when reading long documents; 5) Students asked for the syllabus in hardcopy even thought all 26 lessons were not ready for distribution early in the course.
To address the students' primary concerns, JFE course readers were printed and issued mid-way through the course so that the students would have hardcopies of the lesson outlines and lengthy readings. We learned some valuable lessons by this experience: Two major factors were not thoroughly researched prior to posting online materials: (1) the ability of the IT infrastructure (e.g., student laptops, network access outside the building) to support ease of access to the curriculum materials and (2) the IT literacy level of the class. These problems were complicated by a large turnover in the department's faculty (all military officers) over the summer, which caused delays in the development and approval of the new curriculum until well into the academic year.
Analysis of the initiative using the concept model might have revealed some of these problems prior to online course implementation. For the course planned for this year, the following adjustments have been made: (1) portion of the curriculum will be in hardcopy; (2) Greater emphasis will be put on replacement of older laptops; (3) Access to curriculum information was placed on the AWC homepage to facilitate retrieval from outside the building. An IT literacy survey was made of the class of 2002, and appropriate IT introductory classes and tutorials will be offered.
The Concept Model as an IT Planning Tool
The IT concept model is being used as part of a template for AWC in its overall strategic planning process. As the IT annex to the AWC Strategic Plan is developed, we are using the concept model to help us decide in which directions we wish to go in the next three to eight years. We created a flow chart to describe the process of advancing from the IT concept model to the AWC, AU, and Air Education and Training Command (AETC) strategic planning processes. Faculty members can develop IT requirements and prioritize them in a meaningful way.
The process flow from the AWC strategic planning, programming, and budgeting system (PPBS) to those of AU and AETC provides the strategy-to-task linkages and programmatic pathway through the Air Force Program Objective Memorandum (POM), to articulate and fund our needs: (1) Short Term: There will be IT-related topics such as Information Operations and Information Warfare, and an expansion of IT-enhanced lessons using the JMEANS multimedia system. The Department of Leadership and Ethics has proposed an initiative to use Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs) in lessons.2
All core-curriculum lesson outlines are now accessible through the AWC Web site from off base. In a cooperative project with Air Command and Staff College, the Air Force's Intermediate PME college, we are pursuing the use of e-books in several of our electives. We are in consultation with the Institute for IT Applications at the Air Force Academy and the 333rd Training Squadron at Keesler AFB, Mississippi. They have been using e-books on an experimental basis in their courses.
We are developing a streaming video capability, which will eventually allow resident-program lectures to be available to nonresident and resident students (and conceivably AWC alumni) in near real-time. (2) Long Term: We will use the model to evaluate new technologies by leveraging lessons learned. For example, we are interested in wireless connectivity and virtual private networks and how they could allow both our resident and our nonresident students essentially unlimited but secure access to curriculum materials from virtually anywhere. We are investigating the possible replacement of student laptop computers with either a combination of e-books and PDAs, or some other new developing technology. We are contemplating the ways in which IT may alter the senior PME learning environment.3
Possible Implications of IT Integration in the Nation's Senior Service Schools
Resident senior PME programs historically have been student-centered; mainly involving seminar discussions in groups of 14 to 15 students. IT in the form of advanced classroom aids and multimedia systems has the potential to change this format from student-centered seminar discussion to a materials-centered where the multimedia materials become an integral part of the lesson.
One possible implication of such a change could be a decrease in student interaction during seminars, commonly cited as the single most important benefit of resident program PME. Ironically, this same technology has the potential to take the nonresident program in a different direction. Two-way video teleconferencing could allow an opportunity for nonresident and resident students to participate in each other's seminars, and tune into speakers at remote locations with the capability to ask questions of the speaker. This could lead to a convergence of resident and non-resident senior PME programs.
With IT advancements and an increasingly savvy student body with their own e-learning preferences drive changes in the education process? Ultimately, there may come a point where sophisticated, low-cost IT solutions make a distance-learning PME program an attractive option in an era of small, expeditionary forces with a high operations tempo. Such a convergence would necessitate a review by senior DoD leadership of the continued viability of a highly selective, resident PME program versus a "less prestigious" nonresident version.
Finally, as we look to the future, we anticipate changing demographics in classes, where students will be more technologically literate than their predecessors. They will challenge the faculty's IT prowess to find new ways to exploit IT to enhance learning.4 As is the case with many complex problems of this type, there are more questions raised than answered. We must be aware of these possibilities and plan for the expected as well as the expected, for with change, always comes opportunity. The IT concept model will help us do both.
1. William R. Haden. " Implementing a Comprehensive IT Plan: A Small-College Response," EDUCAUSE Review, September/October 2001, pp. 12-13.
2. The Industrial College of the Armed Forces. Information Systems for Strategic Leaders course at http://www.ndu.edu/ndu/icaf/departments/leadinfosystems/issl/content.htm.
3. Richard A. Chilcoat. "The Fourth Army War College: Preparing Strategic Leaders for the Next Century," Parameters, U.S. Army War College Quarterly, Winter 1995-1996, pp. 3-17.
4. "The Information-Age Mindset: Changes in Students and Implications for Higher Education, EDUCAUSE Review, September/October 2000, pp. 15-24.