Surprisingly, the US military embraced online learning a little more than a decade ago. This was a boom for annual sustainment courses and the ability of highl

Surprisingly, the US military embraced online learning a little more than a decade ago. This was a boom for annual sustainment courses and the ability of highly active units to maintain OSHA, EPA, and other more job specific annual training requirements was greatly increased. This great success in high level reporting percentages for training ended up driving even more training online. This concept is a very slippery slope. The amazing statistics that accompany online training will provide very direct motivation to administrator(generals). Those administrators will easily come to the conclusion that training should be greatly standardized and moved online, due to the high level of efficiency. In reality the DOD has moved some entire training programs to online. The navy has moved entire A and C schools(basic job fields) online. These are resident schools, and they are primarily schools based on hardware, that may also have strong software/theory based systems. The result is highly drilled students with almost no real world or problem solving skills in the field that they have been schooled on. I know this is anecdotal, but I have seen the change in the students first hand and the ability to teach critical analysis on a specific subject with out labs and 2 way live debate can not be underestimated.