Reflections on I/ITSEC 2024
Each year, during the week immediately following Thanksgiving in the United States, over 15,000 people descend on the Orange County Convention Center in Orlando, Florida for the annual I/ITSEC conference.
The Interservice / Industry Training, Simulation and Education Conference (I/ITSEC) is the world's largest modeling, simulation and training event. It’s a hotbed of innovation in simulation and training technologies as well as being arguably the most important venue for the presentation of research in the space.
The Yet team has been attending annually since 2014 — when we presented a desktop-based flight simulator that produced xAPI data to populate real-time flight event dashboards. Over the years, we’ve contributed to a great deal of research, including a 2022 best paper nominee for work on the Total Learning Architecture.
This year, Yet’s Shelly Blake-Plock and Cliff Casey, along with ADL’s Andy Johnson, presented a paper on xAPI Profile design. Shelly also took part in a convening of the IEEE Learning Technology Standards Committee (where he has been an officer since 2018) and a special in-person meeting of the IEEE ICICLE group for implementers of Learning Engineering in government and military contexts.
Some big take-aways from this year’s conference
Learning Engineering is of high-value to enterprise stakeholders.
We lost count of the number of times that the term “Learning Engineering” was mentioned. And yet, it never felt like it was being used as a buzzword. Of note, there were about a half-dozen presentations about Learning Engineering specifically and at least that many related to LE-adjacent matters such as data instrumentation and learning experience design. Significant attention was paid to digital learning ecosystems and their component relations to data standards and modernization. USAF is preparing to open up a Center of Excellence for Learning Engineering in 2025. And representatives of Learning Engineering programs from several universities — including Carnegie Mellon (host of the 2023 annual ICICLE conference on Learning Engineering) and Arizona State University (host of the 2024 conference) — were in attendance.
Accessibility of data and meaningfulness of data to learning outcomes remains an issue in the simulation space.
Wander the expo floor and you will see remarkable examples of simulation fidelity. Want to hop in a helicopter? Check. Jump waves on a Coast Guard cutter? Check. Take a chance at parachuting in VR (while suspended two feet off the ground)? Check. But when it comes to seeing the data output and having a clear explanation of how the data relates to learning and performance outcomes? Not so much.
Some of this is just a matter of investing in the wow factor. And that means cool graphics and hydraulic bells and whistles. But, we’d argue that the real wow factor would be a clear indication and demonstrable evidence that the simulation actually improves learning and performance outcomes.
The IEEE is really taking the lead.
A key outcome of the IEEE sessions was the decision to start up a new study group within the Learning Technology Standards Committee that would be dedicated to the Total Learning Architecture (TLA). The TLA is the standards-based data architecture represented by the core LTSC data standards — including standards for activity data, learning experience metadata, machine-readable competency definitions, and rollups of enterprise learner records. It is at the heart of the DoD’s Enterprise Digital Learning Modernization initiative. This study group will be tasked with collecting research and consensus around developing a standard IEEE guide to the TLA.
For our part, we are continuing to develop sustainable open source software and processes to support the data instrumentation goals of Learning Engineering. And we’ll certainly continue to apply pressure on developers to provide data on learning outcomes. We hope that you will get involved in the TLA study group effort, as that group will be open to the public.