Virtual Academies
Distributed Learning: The Power of a Virtual Academy
The
continued aim to provide military training that is faster, better
and cheaper, means that UK and other international armed forces are
looking to how best new technology can enable training
transformation. The development of virtual environments, such as
virtual academies, offers a way of addressing the suggestion
that less time is going to be spent in the school room, and more in
potentially isolated learning environments, like home, barracks,
and the front line. Students who have been more rapidly deployed,
and yet have time on their hands, now have the ability to interact
(and socialise) with friends, team members, ex-students, and
tutors, independent of location.
What is a virtual academy?
A virtual academy provides somewhere for geographically remote
students and instructors to gather together so that learning can
take place. It provides a media-rich environment which
supports both individual and collaborative, social learning,
and enables distributed ed users to access and interact with
complex learning content in an innovative and cost-effective
fashion.
What can virtual academies achieve?
SELEX Systems Integration believes that virtual academies will
be one of the ways in which training establishments will be looking
to deliver learning and so improve capability and capacity in the
very near future.
SELEX Systems Integration has identified the following as some of
the potential learning benefits offered by a virtual academy:
- Delivering training globally without the need for additional
real estate
- Creating a purpose-built learning environment to foster better,
cheaper and faster training
- Delivering a variety of media-rich training experiences to a
distributed student base with the built in provision of
extra-curricular / supportive / peer to peer type learning
engagements in additional to formal training
- Facilitating an environment for alumni and networking
activities
- Learning can become a collaborative effort between learners
from locations all over the world
- Alumni network to provide continued instructor and peer to peer
support on the job
SELEX Systems Integration's experience with virtual
academies
SELEX Systems Integration (formerly VEGA) built a virtual academy concept demonstrator for ITEC
2008, which the company used to trial the delivery of
different training engagements within a virtual environment.
More broadly, SELEX Systems Integration helps its clients
understand when, why and how learning can improve their operational
capability and then achieve it. As experts in learning best
practice, SELEX Systems Integration is conversant in all the latest
training technological enablers, using the most appropriate COTS
technologies to deliver effective training architectures for the
client.
SELEX Systems Integration can create bespoke virtual academies
in line with an individual training establishment’s specific
requirement, and then integrate the required mix of COTS training
toolsets with which students can interact. This includes the
insertion of many of the technology-based training solutions on
which SELEX Systems Integration has built its reputation. SELEX
Systems Integration can therefore:
- Facilitate bringing the virtual and real worlds together – we
can tie virtual worlds in to a customer’s existing applications and
processes.
- Integrate real processes with virtual practice. We can offer
new perspectives in examining company knowledge and organisational
learning by making it explicit in a virtual context.
To further enhance SELEX Systems Integration's virtual academy
offering, SELEX Systems Integration is one of the UK’s leading
Government accredited information assurance providers and so is an
ideal partner with whom to discuss the security implications
inherent in the development of virtual environments.
Internal links relating to virtual
academies
» A vision for virtual academies
» ITEC 2009
» Team and Multi-Team
Training
External links relating to virtual
academies
» Wonderland blog
Contact SELEX Systems Integration for
further information about virtual academies