Military Review English Edition November-December 2013 | Page 21

D I S TA N C E E D U C AT I O N
Distributed learning is the delivery of training “to
soldiers and [Department of Army] civilians, units,
and organizations at the right place and time through
the use of multiple means and technology; may
involve student-instructor interaction in real time
(synchronous) and non-real time (asynchronous).”4
The Command and General Staff Officer School
consists of a common core course and functional
area qualification course. For operations-career field
officers, the qualification course is the Advanced
Operations Course (AOC). Successful completion
of the common course and the respective qualification course is required for award of the Joint
Professional Military Education Phase I credit and
Military Education Level Four.5
The common core prepares all field grade officers
with a warfighting focus for leadership positions in
Army, joint, interagency, intergovernmental, and
multinational organizations executing unified land
operations. The AOC provides operations careerfield officers with a warfighting focus for battalion
and brigade command and prepares them to conduct unified land operations in joint, interagency,
and multi-national environments. The course also
provides officers with the requisite competencies
to serve successfully as division through echelonabove-corps level staff officers.6
From an educational standpoint, the common
core builds an officer’s foundational knowledge
and comprehension of Army and joint doctrine,
while AOC uses more of a collaborative learning
environment to analyze military problems and apply
military processes. Using a sports analogy, the
common core is the individual training a player does
in the offseason to prepare for the collective team
scrimmages of AOC in the preseason. Together,
they prepare officers for the complex problems the
Army faces in seasons of peace and war.

Beyond the “Brick and Mortar”
of Fort Leavenworth

The Army has never been able to bring all officers
from all components to the resident course at Fort
Leavenworth, regardless of the impacts of selection
boards and military conflicts. To create more resident
experiences for the common core, the Command and
General Staff School established pilot programs at
Fort Gordon, Ga., and Fort Lee, Va., in 2003, and
another at Fort Belvoir, Va., in 2004. In 2009, the
MILITARY REVIEW

• November-December 2013

Army added a fourth common core campus at Redstone Arsenal, Ala., Since the program’s inception,
over 6,900 officers have attended an in-class, collaborative common core course.7 Moreover, since
2004, the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security
Cooperation at Fort Benning, Ga., also taught the
Command and General Staff Officer Course to U.S.
and international field grade officers from 15 different countries.8
For decades, The Army School System provided
variations of the resident staff officer course to tens
of thousands of National Guard and Reserve officers
across the country at its 100-plus locations across the
continental United States and in Hawaii, Germany,
and Puerto Rico. Today, The Army School System
continues to teach the common core in three phases
to thousands of officers each year using a combination of online lessons, weekend classes, and annual
training.
The classic form of nonresident correspondence
courses that many call the “box of books” began in
1923 when the college established the Correspondence School for the National Guard and Army
Reserve officers. In 1948, correspondence courses
were officially renamed Army Extension Courses,
and the Command and General Staff College established the Extension Course Department.9 Over
the decades, the department name for nonresident
studies changed several more times. In 1997, the
Department of Defense and White House established
the Advanced Distributed Learning program, an
initiative to promote the use of technology-based
learning.10 Shortly thereafter, the Command and
General Staff College began to digitize its curriculum under the School of Advanced Distributed
Learning. In 2007, the college completely reorganized, integrating the School of Advanced Distributed Learning and renaming it the Department of
Distance Education.11
Now the department has three divisions of 80
instructors and advisors who facilitate instruction to
over 4,500 Army officers from all three components
worldwide. The current faculty is a mix of active
duty and retired officers serving as Department of
the Army civilians. The Department of Distance
Education continues to add faculty to meet the
growing student population generated by the 2012
Army Directive for Optimization of IntermediateLevel Education.
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