Accelerating Knowledge Acquisition for Close Combat Warriors

United States Marines are among the most lethal fighting force on the planet. To maintain and enhance this lethality, the members of the United States Marine Corps must continuously master new knowledge and skills. Adaptive training technology has demonstrated an ability to significantly enhance learning effectiveness. However, these earlier approaches have often been shown to be expensive to develop and difficult to maintain. Sonalysts will develop the Rapid Adaptive Training Environment (RATE) to allow Marines to author, deliver, and maintain adaptive interactive multimedia instruction. The process begins with a set of highly usable authoring tools. Using these tools, SMEs will define learning objectives and use validated prescriptions to build various content objects. Marines will use Moodle to access the delivery environment. The RATE management suite will enable integration of within the Marine Corps eLearning ecosystem and provide access to RATE’s rich data stores. This includes both conventional report generation and “native support” for ML/AI investigations of the learning process. RATE will employ a Modular Open Systems Architecture to support both competition and research goals. RATE will allow Marines to rapidly produce courseware, employ vendor-neutral curriculum files to avoid vendor lock, and enable “plug and play” evaluation of alternative delivery tools.