Here Come the Marines!

Since the establishment of the Marine Corps College of Continuing Education (CCE) in 1998, Professional Military Education (PME) in the Marine Corps has been undergoing an overhaul. The infamous “box of books,” as it has come to be known, is no more. Independent Guided Study (IGS) is the formal name for the rudimentary form of distance education that had been the accepted educational construct for 80% of the aspiring upward mobile Marine officers for many years. It’s a basic self-paced correspondence course, with all the materials and a multiple-choice final exam delivered neatly in a box to your doorstep. Marines would work on the course as time permitted and motivation prompted; the only constraint being a 5-year completion window. But, senior officers routinely recognized that, when compared to the other 20% of their peer group (those who attended a residential version of the course) these Marines simply did not stack up. Comprehending what they were supposed to be learning and then effectively employing that learning on the job was consistently observed as less than expected. Even when the box of books was augmented with seminars, there remained a distinct difference between the two groups. But, the supplementary seminar presentations were voluntary and the format was more or less a lecture at a distance that may or may not have been relevant to the individual student; they were still, by their very nature, not equal to the residential program.Enter the U. S. Marine Corps’ Son of Seminar. It hit the ground running in October 2007. Based on the Socratic method, this new delivery format will be centered on highly seasoned instructors positing well-directed questions and limiting their lecture time in deference to the facilitation of student-to-student discussion. The program will consist of eight courses to be delivered over a reduced 2-year construct. Active student participation is a requirement in the seminars that will be offered both on-site and online. Rubrics will be used to assess student contributions, writing, speaking and performance in exercises.One of the people heading up this transformation in Marine Corps distance education is James I. Van Zummeren, dean of academics, Marine Corps College of Continuing Education, Training and Education Command (TECOM). In a recent interview, he gave his views on the direction of distance e in the Marine Corps.PROMMASIT: What experience did you have with distance education as a Marine officer?VAN ZUMMEREN: I did two nonresident courses. I did the Amphibious Warfare School for captains. I did the traditional box of books, nonresident; we call it Independent Guided Studies, IGS. I did that as a lieutenant, and then as a captain went to the resident school. I also did the Naval War College, what they call the off-campus program. It’s a nonresident, seminar-based 3-year construct. I did that, but then I also went to the Marine Corps Command Staff resident experience. So I did two nonres and two resident of similar courses.ORNDORFF: Can you expound a little bit on what your view of the difference is between education and training, and how that relates to what you’re doing with the Marine Corps distance education program?VAN ZUMMEREN: You know it’s always fun, because when we get into conferences or meetings, at a training and education command or anywhere really in the world of academics, there’s always a conversation on whether that’s really training or that’s really education. Some of us have a perspective that there isn’t all education and/or all training. It’s really a combination. In some there is going to be a little bit more emphasis on critical thinking and creative thinking, and some is going to be a little bit more emphasis on a process of doing something within an approved set of procedures.So the training and education to me is somewhat blurred. For example, our Command Staff College Distance Program is more about education because it deals more about thinking about things, learning about strategic thought, and coming up with solutions that not only are critical based on doctrine and constructs, but also creative. That’s the whole point—bring in your own perspective to solve or provide a solution to some kind of emerging issue. The training aspect is more like our Expeditionary Warfare School, School of Captains, in which we are looking for them to demonstrate, within a set of procedures and policies, certain actions. Like how you would tactically move forces to achieve a mission. And we would think that’s more training.So when you look at our programs, which are basically professional military education, we look at it as a combination of both; also, we look at the training aspect as the doing part, the practical application. You talk about building something that’s great theoretically, and that’s all nice stuff. Do it. So it’s that “do it” part that we see as the training, because when they do it, we provide feedback, and show them if they’re really in error, show them a better way or a different perspective to get them to a solution. Because there’s no real solution, other than a set of procedures to get you to what we may think is a usable solution.As a side note—I teach a course at George Mason University for undergraduates. It’s a 300 level, and it’s a writing-intensive speech communication course. Most of them are not real clear on what creative or critical thinking is, but more importantly, they’re not real clear on what a normal essay or paper construct is, like with an introduction, a middle, and a conclusion. So we spend a lot more time trying to get them up to speed because, like speaking, writing is one of the critical skills.And we see the same thing in our Officer Corps and in our nonresident courses, and that’s one reason why, as we get to these questions, we’re moving to a different type of nonresident, or distance learning, model because we want them to be able to demonstrate what they have learned.ORNDORFF: And that’s exactly it. It’s a blend, really, the perfect storm of anybody’s overall education and training. It’s not just one or the other. It’s not just in person, sitting in a classroom, sitting at a computer taking an online course, or literally going out and driving the newest version of a vehicle around. It’s got to be the combination of them all together, as I see it.VAN ZUMMEREN: Absolutely! And therein lies the complexity of nonresident education. Because it is in trying to find a balance between what you can do online and what you want to do in some form of collaboration. And then again, what’s the topic? If it’s business administration, it’s one thing. If it’s tactics, it’s another. And if it’s leadership, another whole different dynamic of what kind of interaction you’re actually going to have.ORNDORFF: How do the experiences that you have had with distance learning in the Marine Corps compare with the experiences that students have nowadays with the distance education program?VAN ZUMMEREN: I think prior to around 1997—that’s when the College of Continuing Education stood up the seminar program—the Marine Corps, just like all the services, tried to do nonresident education on the cheap. They looked at those officers who they thought were very competitive and needed the resident experience to make them more competitive [for promotion]; [they] went to the resident program. And the throughput is sufficient to sustain itself through our resident schools to get people into the general officer ranks.The problem is, to the Marine Corps, it’s 20% of your population. Eighty percent of your population does not get the resident opportunities, so they have to do a nonresident. As indicated earlier in the conversation, a box of books with a multiple choice assessment tool is about as cheap as you can get. And it’s more of a check in the box. It’s more about surface information. That’s what we provided, until we started getting to 1997, and into a seminar. The biggest change—first of all, we had to convince the Marine Corps—we did this in around 2004—is that if the institution is serious about wanting to develop a competent corps of officers or leaders, then what they have to provide them, in different parts of their career, is learning opportunities in which they truly address the priorities or core competencies, with more than just knowledge of an actual experience, and skill in applying what we think are the critical learning outcomes of our resident education.And the Corps, of course, agreed. So they provided the money, which is always the showstopper. The second part of that, of transforming, literally, our box of books to a seminar-based environment, was to find the time for students to do it. Because if you’re doing asynchronous, or just a box of books, and you have a five-year construct or window to do it in, you do it whenever you find time to do it. When you start getting into a more regimented seminar, 2-year construct, we start getting into a more personal time, because it’s a tighter window, and it’s more disciplined and more focused, too. You all meet once a week during the school year.…So we had to fight that whole issue. And then the other issue that goes along with that is finding a corps of course developers—or we call them course directors—who can build the courses in a comprehensive way that are useful in a seminar environment.PROMMASIT: Have you had much resistance from any sides, like people who maybe preferred the box of books, since it was easier and didn’t take as much work, per se?ORNDORFF: Or didn’t want to spend the money, or other areas of resistance as well?VAN ZUMMEREN: I think that we have found minimal resistance, if at all. And part of it is, that myself, Terry Kerrigan the director, and a bunch of my faculty are all retired Marines or retired military. We’re all graduates of our resident programs. We’ve all been instructors at the resident programs. We’ve all been commanders. So we all have a sense of the impact of what resident education does, and we’ve all had officers working for us who have been nonresident graduates or the box of books graduates and saw the deficiency.I would argue that most of the senior leadership of the Marine Corps, when we started briefing the seminar opportunity, agreed with us. Now we started the seminar—voluntary seminar program—which you could be a “box of books” [student] or take the seminar option; 1998 was the first seminar. So by the time we got to 2004, we had significant amount of feedback from instructors and from students about the value of doing this. Commanders [were] saying, “You know, the graduates coming from the seminar thing? They’re way ahead of the box of books, and they’re almost like a resident graduate.”PROMMASIT: What great validation.VAN ZUMMEREN: It was. But again, most of it’s a living experience, and so it wasn’t that big of a deal to do that, and of course we believe in it, so when we brief these things, we have a little bit of passion. But the Corps agrees. That’s why we got the green light to start, this coming October, for our Command Staff School for majors, the all seminar only distance program, which is significant—there is no more box of books for them. Which means that we had to [ask ourselves]—if we’re not doing a box of books, then how can we touch all our officers worldwide, in very high up-tempo environment?And the way we can touch them is using Blackboard as really the backbone, our learning support system, to be able to touch all students, regardless if you’re doing on-site traditional seminars, or if you’re going to do online asynchronous seminars. Either way, you’ve all got to come in through Blackboard. And the only time that the difference is obvious is if you’re doing purely online, Blackboard will be your total environment, period. But of course the Corps has had the patience, and this is significant, the Corps has had the patience to allow us to build. We’ve been building this … for three years now. We have done a little bit of validation, and we will start full up this coming October.Our school year goes October to June. And our program is a two year construct. Because they allowed us that patience, we have really focused in the most important part, and that is building the courseware that matches this, and more importantly, a faculty development program so our instructors can lead seminars and not sit there and try to lecture, which is key.PROMMASIT: You acknowledge that there are limitations to a distance course, and that the Marine Corps also understands that and does not expect it to be equal. That’s significant. Quite often people think the results should be exactly the same.There has to be some understanding that it is a different environment.VAN ZUMMEREN: You’re exactly right. What we do is we sit down with the Marine Corps University and the colleges specifically, and we say, “All right, list your core competencies, the outcomes, the expectations of the graduates, and they do. Then we sit down and honestly say, “Can we meet some of it or all of it? Based on that, what are the learning objectives that support that? How do you get to those outcomes?”We really home in on what’s most critical. The seminar experience allows us to hone in on leadership, writing, and speaking, along with the learning outcomes or objectives of strategic thought.PROMMASIT: What has been the biggest challenge for you so far in the changeover process?VAN ZUMMEREN: A very loaded question—the whole thing has been very challenging. I think dealing with the unknown. In my graduate studies, I did two hybrid online courses at George Mason—hybrid in the sense you took, of a 16-week semester, you took four lessons on campus and 12 lessons from your home. They were great learning experiences. Some of my course directors are online instructors, or were students of online. So many of us bring a lot of experience doing online type stuff. All of us have been engaged in our nonresident seminar programs. We bring all that experience.The biggest change is [the exam]. Because the seminar program, up to today, has been an option, students still took the multiple-choice exam, which was the same exam that the box of books students took. Everything was really based off of what that exam was going to be. So the instructors really ended up teaching the exam. Not a good way of doing business, but that’s how it matured.This changed to a seminar, or to a Socratic learning method in which the students, theoretically, are the ones who are teaching each other, and the instructor is really a facilitator. That we see as the long pole in the tent. That is where the challenge is—to get the seminar leaders to be a little bit more quiet and to orchestrate or coordinate the conversations to make sure that everybody participates. That’s what we’ve been doing with our faculty development sessions and practicing for the last two years. To me, it was, it is, and it’s going to be always a challenge for us.The changeover process is admittedly a challenge. The Socratic learning method forces students to be active in class sessions. More important than accumulation of knowledge, the main focus is on teaching Marine officers how to respond to situations by applying creative critical-thinking techniques. At the command level, Marine officers are often called upon to make critical decisions in a thinking techniques. At the command level, Marine officers are often called upon to make critical decisions in a short amount of time. With this new nonresident program in place, more Marines are able to reap the benefits of first-rate command training, once reserved for the top 20%.As noted in his interview, Van Zummeren concedes that no distance education program can fully replicate the experience of the resident program. However, the staff has worked diligently to select the most important skills and to address those areas in the nonresident program. A cadre of dedicated instructors prepares and delivers instruction through online courseware. Not only has funding been provided for the changeover process, but the call has gone out to commanding officers to facilitate training by allowing participants time during the work day to prepare for classes and practice what they have learned. By establishing an atmosphere that encourages students instead of hindering them, the chances of a student successfully completing the program are much higher. By applying interactive forms of distance education, the Marine Corps can build an organization of well-trained professionals who are able to perform jobs with greater skill and efficiency. Thanks in part to the enthusiasm and hard work of the CCE staff, the Marine Corps is committed to upgrading the education provided to all Marines. With the advent of the new Command Staff College program in October 2007, the Corps is on their way to accomplishing that goal.JAMES I. VAN ZUMMEREN IS DEAN OF ACADEMICS, MARINE CORPS COLLEGE OF CONTINUING EDUCATION, TRAINING AND EDUCATION COMMAND (TECOM).

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