AMPLE: Adaptive Module for Personalized Learning Environments

ABSTRACT:Despite ever-shrinking training budgets, military personnel must continue to develop and maintain proficiency to ensure success in increasingly complex operational environments. To achieve proficiency within these constraints, training methods and technologies must enable efficient and personalized learning. To do so, training approaches must track and asses competence and account for individual differences throughout the training development and delivery lifecycle. Aptima proposes to develop the Adaptive Module for Personalized Learning Environments (AMPLE), an adaptive training management module that plugs into training systems and learning management systems, and assesses individual competence, accounts for individual differences, and provides training recommendations enabling personalized training across training environments. To build such a system, Aptima will leverage existing documentation to understand the different training requirements across positions. AMPLE will integrate with existing performance measurement technologies to collect, consolidate, and store multi-sourced data and assessments, such as the individual learners competence, position, and previous learning experiences, and will apply adaptive algorithms to these data and assessments to provide intelligent, data-driven training recommendations. When fully implemented, AMPLE will enable training designers and instructors to maximize training resources by providing to individual learners personalized training that supports development and maintenance of competence.BENEFIT:AMPLE will be an adaptive training management module that plugs into candidate training systems and existing learning management systems, and provides personalized training recommendations based on the continuous assessment of an individuals competence, accounting for individual differences, and will do so within the context of an integrated training environment (i.e., a set of training systems). Specifically, AMPLE will enable training designers, instructors, and researchers to maximize training resources by providing intelligent, data-driven training recommendations and by allowing users to examine training questions related to specific training goals, such as minimizing skill decay, maximizing retention, or achieving broad coverage of training requirements across positions. This hybrid approach will allow users to understand the impacts of maximizing certain learning outcomes over others. While our primary focus is to address the needs of the Air Force training and training-research communities, the adaptive training management module and underlying approaches will be designed to be generalizable to address personalized training needs across other DoD agencies and commercial organizations. Our initial efforts will focus on the Processing, Exploitation, and Dissemination domain, which represents a complex mission involving a variety of roles, disciplines, and training needs. End users will benefit by receiving recommendations for personalizing training, understanding where learners are in the development of competence, and understanding how best to optimize future training within the constraints of available resources.