Military Review English Edition November-December 2013 | Page 23

D I S TA N C E E D U C AT I O N

Professional Military Education to the World

Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation History, officers coordinate with their branch managers
to reserve their virtual “seat” in an upcoming AOC
distributed learning class. As of 2013, there are four
AOC starts per year based on the graduation dates of
the four common core satellite locations.
The Department of Distance Education’s AOC
program is a 12-month program conducted using both
synchronous and asynchronous techniques to achieve
an “adaptive learning” environment that transforms
“the learner from a passive [recipient] of information
to a collaborator in the educational process.”15 Officers
are formed into staff groups of 16 students coming
from widely diverse branches, components, and duty
stations. It is not unusual to be on a team of officers
dispersed from Afghanistan, Kuwait, Germany,
Kosovo, the continental United States, Hawaii, and
Korea. An AOC facilitator guides two separate staff
groups through a yearlong schedule of weekly lessons
that currently cover seven blocks of instruction—one
leadership block, two military history blocks, and four
operations blocks covering Coalition Forces Land
Component Command to brigade-level planning.
In AOC, the vast majority of learning takes place
through peer-to-peer interaction instead of facilitatorto-student as officers collectively apply Joint and
MILITARY REVIEW

• November-December 2013

Army planning processes to analyze and solve
complicated problems. As they work, students share
their branch expertise, operational experiences, and
personal perspectives of the course materials. By the
end of Advanced Operations Course , the average staff
group will spend approximately 65 hours together
online using Defense Connect Online.
In 2012, the RAND Corporation examined the
Department of Distance Education’s AOC program
using exit and post graduation surveys. Their study
found that AOC—
uses a more ambitious approach than most
standard distance or blended learning programs in the Army or elsewhere in that it
requires substantial instructor-student and
student-student interaction and is completely
distributed and often synchronous in nature.16
This approach has its strengths and weaknesses.
As to strengths, the majority of students reported that
AOC met its core purpose, student-instructor and student-student interactions were important, and instructors and computer-based instruction lessons were
effective. The Command and General Staff School’s
continuous improvement process for AOC allows for
constant revision and updates. Additionally, the experience gained from AOC’s virtual planning sessions
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