The navy recognizes that training is expensive and critical to maintaining force readiness. The process for developing and gaining approval of a training program for new system is grueling and time-consuming. It’s not unusual for a training program implemented to support a new system to take five years of development. Final approval for a navy course is with the Deputy Chief of Naval Operations for Manpower Personnel and Training (DCNO), who is the second most senior naval officer.
To gain DCNO course approval, the navy program office managing acquisition of the new system must account for all training aids including the classroom facilities needed to support those training aids, do front-end and job task analysis, develop the curriculum, pilot the course at least once and capture all review comments (red-lining), and develop a manpower analysis of the number of instructors, support personnel required to support the course, and a five-year projection of students expected to attend the new course.
At the time I attended Instructor Training School and taught at SubTrafac the navy surface training program used the “110” standard. This standard defined the curriculum requirements for gaining formal navy approval of a training program. The submarine service of that era used the OD45519 standard, which was similar to the 110 but had more rigorous requirements for learning objectives and curriculum materials. Both standards specified format requirements for all training material such as visual learning aids, proctor guides, test banks, student training handouts, and the curriculum along with a train-the-trainer curriculum.
The 110 and OD45519 standards were paper-based systems. When I was teaching at SubTraFac in the mid-1980s micro–computer-based word processors were just becoming commercialized.
In the 1980s the navy began development of the Authoring Instructional Materials (AIM), a software management system consisting of a set of commercial and government software for the development and design of training curricula and instructional content. Today AIM is the standard tool for managing and archiving all navy instructional materials. AIM comprises the toolsets AIM I, developed for the Personal Performance Profile training approach and AIM II, developed for the Task-Based training approach. In practice, AIM I is commonly used for the surface navy training and AIM II is used for submarine training. At some point in the future the navy expects to standardize on AIM II.
AIM I and AIM II were first released between 1987 and 1997. An updated version of AIM was developed between 2006 and 2012. According to the Naval Air Warfare Center Training Systems Division (NAWCTSD), which manages AIM, the system has been able to reduce the “number of hours spent for development of new training materials by as much as 25%, and reduce maintenance of existing materials by as much as 50%” over the former paper-based curriculum systems[1].
One major benefit of AIM II is its capacity to store training content on a SQL server, serving as a relational database for managing the relationships between instructional material elements. Training material content is available as PDF, XML and HTML, which improves the ability to cross-utilize information in a variety of technical material (maintenance manuals, operational manuals, etc.). In 2009, Silber and Foshay estimated there was 30,000 hours of navy instructional material archived in AIM. [2]
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[1] “Authoring Instructional Materials (AIM)“. Naval Air Warfare Center Training Systems Division,Retrieved 30 April 2013, https://www.navair.navy.mil/nawctsd/. As cited in the Wikipedia entry for “Authoring Instructional Materials.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Authoring_Instructional_Materials
[2] Kenneth H. Silber; Wellesley R. Foshay (19 November 2009). Handbook of Improving Performance in the Workplace, Instructional Design and Training Delivery, John Wiley & Sons. p. 216. ISBN 978-0-470-52506-7. As cited in the Wikipedia entry for “Authoring Instructional Materials.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Authoring_Instructional_Materials
