Along with Federal Acquisitions Institute (FAI), National Association of Purchasing Management (NAPM) and Arizona State University's (ASU) College of Business and Information Technology Departments will develop and maintain an internet-based 21st Century Distributed Learning Environment, incorporating both current and leading-edge technologies, to benefit both the public and private sector acquisition communities. A digital infrastructure will be developed to distribute training, education, and mentoring programs, as well as online performance support tools.

Concurrent with development and deployment of asynchronous digital training utilizing existing ubiquitous technologies, significant research and development will be undertaken to discover those synchronous and asynchronous teaching methodologies to best deliver training in the 21st century. Over the next five years, various educational, instructional, mentoring, and performance support products and programs will be designed, developed, tested, adjusted, and rolled out. As new technologies are discovered through the R&D; effort throughout the five-year period, they will be incorporated into the Distributed Learning Environment.

This project will leverage the complementary competencies of the three participating organizations -- FAI, NAPM and ASU. The existing FAI infrastructure prototype will serve as a foundation for the project. NAPM and ASU will work closely together to develop instructional content. Within ASU, there will be two participating organizations. The Instructional Support group of IT will develop technology infrastructure to enable the 21st century distributed learning environment. The College of Business (COB), in collaboration with NAPM, will develop course content utilizing the ASU, NAPM, and FAI infrastructures.

The National Association of Purchasing Management (NAPM) will work closely with FAI to repurpose existing educational content into online courses. Up to six initial courses have been identified by FAI. Together with subject matter experts from the federal acquisition community, and practitioners and academics from the "commercial" buying community, NAPM will convert the courses for online delivery. As ASU¹s Information Technology group researches, develops, tests, and approves various delivery and presentation mechanisms, more leading edge technologies will be incorporated in the learning environment.

 

 

ASU IT will conduct research in Technology Delivered Education (TDE), for both synchronous and asynchronous delivery of instruction.

  • Evaluate existing tools and models including emerging standards such as IMS (Instructional Management System) and the Metadata model, along with tools such as real-time audio/video interactivity. Focus will be placed on features such as:
    • economies and ease of use
    • scalability and deployability
    • learning needs of students
    • adaptability to different subject area
    • ease of customization
  • Prototype a TDE delivery model and have it reviewed by potential users;
  • Develop assessment and tracking systems;
  • Develop support systems (both hardware and software) to enable deployment of the TDE delivery system;
  • Field-test the TDE delivery system in academic classes and online applications training;
  • Put in place a flexible and expandable delivery environment to meet the current and future needs of FAI and ASU in TDE.

To achieve the goal of course content development, the COB will select six Business courses and will provide the support presented in the attached budget. For each selected course, the corresponding professor will be given a summer grant and a graduate assistant. Additional staff support will be provided by the existing COB Instructional Technology group.

It is expected that this effort will lead to completion of a significant portion of each course. Additional work will be carried out during the fall semester by a combination of reduced teaching schedules for some faculty, the availability of graduate assistants and the support of our staff specialists. The goal will be to complete the development of some of these courses by December 31, 1998 so that the courses would be ready for possible delivery in the spring of 1999.

One of these courses will be identified to include leading/bleeding-edge technologies so that this infrastructure can be piloted and improved upon prior to incorporating into all online courses. Throughout each of the project years, at least one content-viable course will also include many of the technologies being researched by the R&D; group at ASU.