Location: Commerce I
Facilitators: Nada Dabbagh & Kevin Clark

1. Introductions

1. Introductions of GMU faculty – their backgrounds and current research interests
2. Introductions of DAU personnel
   • Rebecca Clark manages learning models (immersion graduate)
   • Jill Garcia manages the acquisition community connections and other information resources
   • Dr. Paul Alfieri – Director of Research. His goal is to make the learning enterprise better. They have a mandate to reform the way acquisitions does business. He is also the editor of the DAU Journals and he encouraged us to submit papers for one of the journals. He will put us in touch with the specific people and departments we may need to access during the project.
   • Dr. Chris Hardy – Director of e-learning and Technology Center. After 1 Oct, the name will change to g-learning to more accurately reflect the global reach of products and services. There are 130,000 people in their certified work force. He concluded by saying that he would like us to review what they’ve got; how can they do things better; we might work on a really exciting project.
3. Introduction of Immersion members.

2. Immersion Program Overview and Learning Environment Platforms – Kevin and Sally

Kevin reviewed sponsorship, admittance and level of documentation required of students. Documents are posted on the project site and are available for review at any time.

Sally discussed our choice of wordpress and pbworks as our learning platforms, indicating the benefits of each platform over others we considered. She took the group through the wordpress site, indicating where the client could access information.

3. Project Introduction – Nada

Nada began her presentation by discussing wordpress and pbworks, with reference to an article by Steven Wheeler in Future Internet publication.

She reviewed the grant requirements and how course syllabus and project goals align.

4. Discussion of Project Goals (DAU Team)

Dr. Hardy reviewed parts of the DAU website, including the command briefing section. He discussed accreditation, the home and remote site organization and duties, and gave us some information about the vast resources available on their website for members of the DAU work force community. He introduced Jill Garcia and Rebecca Clark when he discussed Continuous Learning Modules and ACC. He also referred to Judith Bayliss, who is in charge of faculty professional development when he discussed the fact that DAU faculty are subject matter experts.

DAU has a data mart where they store feedback information about every course.  On a 7 point rating scale, their instructors receive targeted assistance if they fall below a 5. Their IT infrastructure is huge, and capable of housing courses and social media. He also informed us that a very large percentage of the acquisition work force will be retiring soon.

They utilize integrated process thinking – a functional type of team brought together each time they update or build a course. Some courses are mandated and must be designed and taught in a certain way. The use of gaming and simulation is mandated and those technologies are incorporated into courses as appropriate. He also discussed some barriers including bandwidth, design costs, and time factors.

He explained the certification process. He also told us that since 80% job learning is informal, they want to look beyond single courses or modules and look in a deliberate way at learning access. He suggested the group might browse the DAU catalog and sign up for a course.

He reiterated that he would like the GMU students to provide a fresh look at DAU affordances.

Jill talked about the ACC, specifically Communities of Practice. She commented that many people are using the ‘just in time’ nature of the site to answer on the job questions, but that she would like to see more reciprocity among site visitors.

Rebecca suggested that a simple way of looking at learning outcomes, strategies and assessment, combined with technology would be a helpful outcome for her department. Perhaps something like a rapid prototyping tool.

5. Student Team Questions

Many of our questions were answered in the DAU discussion above. We did ask about contact information and how to request access to data and personnel. We also asked about the initiation, processes and methods for developing learning tools of all types. We asked about the things that DAU does that enabled them to earn their unprecedented 3 commendations from the accrediting organizations.

6. Action Items

Immersion team will:

• Continue to investigate learning assets at www.dau.mil
• Request an account to participate in CoP and interest areas
• Register for an account to access and browse continuous learning modules.
• Recap this meeting together and develop list of information that might help us as we develop the front end analysis

DAU team offered to:

• Provide a wide range of high and low-rated course offerings for us to review
• Provide some of their best courses so we can review them in the context of appropriate technologies

Make themselves available for questions from immersion team

 7. Closing

The group is reminded that our partnership should be viewed with the project proposal, statement of work, and ID perspectives in mind:

• What are your learning outcomes?
• Are courses aligning with those outcomes?
• Are you teaching, say, problem solving skills, but evaluating the course with a multiple choice test?
• The way to view technology is to make sure that it helps the outcome of the learners.

A wide range of possible projects were generated from today’s meeting. Some ideas included virtual environments, mobile learning, simulations, web 2.0 technology, integration of online resources with courses, and more! These possibilities seem to fall into general categories of technology, knowledge management, including both macro and micro views of the organization.