Through GuardNet and an expanding e-learning curriculum, the center could potentially touch about 365,000 Army National Guardsmen who drill on weekends or during the summer. Add the Air National Guard and the numbers reach nearly 500,000 possible soldier students. Blending learning Most current Guard e-learning courses are considered blended learning and still have residency requirements at the northern Little Rock campus. Learning on-line has also deepened the residency curriculum by shifting some topics to the student, cancelling some requirements and allowing for shortened stays at the Arkansas campus. The lion s share of the Guard s current e-learning curriculum accessible from a Web portal is aimed at training unit support staff.
Topics tend to overlap with Web-based corporate training.
Using SmartForce and SkillSoft courses on its own servers, the Guard offers about 1,200 asynchronous courses, including IT training, human resource soft skills and job performance improvement. Another 25 courses focus on National Guard job- specific skills. After a shootout in June 1999 among several learning management system providers, the Guard settled on Avilar s WebMentor chosen with an eye to handling courses authored in a range of software. Looking ahead Over the next five years, the Guard has ambitious plans of migrating on-line nearly 90 more courses that currently require residency at its professional education center. Future e-learning will bring more realistic and interactive learning directly to the soldier.