By the end of 2021, DAU plans to successfully transform into a platform that connects defense acquisition workforce members to all the resources they need with a high-quality, low-friction user experience.
by Christopher R. Hardy
January 25, 2021
Jim Woolsey came to Defense Acquisition University in 2014 as its new president and inherited a world-class corporate university that had earned more than 70 awards in 15 years. During Woolsey’s own tenure, and due to his leadership, DAU continued in its excellence journey and was repeatedly recognized and ranked in the top 10 by Chief Learning Officer’s LearningElite awards, culminating in its recognition as CLO’s Organization of the Year in 2018. Finally, Woolsey was personally recognized as CLO of the Year in 2019.
Where would we go from here? Was DAU in for a surprise! First, a little history, and then I will share the immense challenges we face for the future (and, more important, our solution).
A November 2020 paper by Woolsey and Deputy Under Secretary of Defense (Acquisition & Sustainment) Alan R. Shaffer states, “When DAU opened its doors in the early 1990s, the forces driving education and training — particularly how we all learned and consumed information — were radically different. We were living in a time when information was relatively scarce, and the ways to distribute it were relatively few. Fast forward nearly three decades and the landscape has changed dramatically. Today, instantaneous connections to knowledge, resources, and expertise power the global economy and drive our personal lives. To help our customers/students thrive in this environment, DAU is transforming from a schoolhouse to a highly-networked platform, using many different modes and methods to provide information, tools, and training from numerous sources.”
In early 2019, DAU began this new transformation that was aligned to and driven by our senior leadership’s National Defense Strategy (in the Pentagon), which clearly described a world in which threats are growing while our military advantage is eroding, and where the environment is increasingly complex and dynamic. This brought about a mandate for urgent change for our department of defense, its emerging capabilities and our 183,000 defense acquisition workforce members who rely on DAU to provide them with the knowledge, skills and abilities to meet and support these future challenges.
As a result, at the beginning of 2020, DAU was poised to quickly deliver very different learning and development solutions to meet our customers’ needs every day, in whatever form and place were most powerful. This was the essence of our start to transform DAU into what we now call a “modern learning platform,” totally focusing on our customers.
Becoming a modern learning platform
Just what is a modern learning platform? Woolsey envisioned it for DAU and describes it as follows in the aforementioned paper: “While a number of things helped shape this vision of becoming a modern learning platform, much of it was driven by customer feedback. DAU has worked closely with our business senior leaders … to better understand their needs and that of their workforces to envision this construct for a new DAU. To implement this modern learning platform for our customers, DAU must be able to provide three new capabilities: 1) frictionless learning that provides easy access to training and resources at the moment of need; 2) world-class content that is high-quality, current and relevant; and 3) a dynamic network that connects people who need information to people who have information. This also better reflects how people work and learn today.”
According to the paper, the new learning platform (DAU 2021) would have three important characteristics:
- Frictionless learning that provides easy access to training and resources at the moment of need. When learning is user-driven and time is scarce, it has to be easy to discover the learning or tools that you need, and that learning has to be targeted and efficient. The new DAU platform would make learning available naturally, intuitively and precisely when it’s needed.
- World-class content that is high-quality, current and relevant. In a world where learning is infinitely customizable, we have to make training consumable at the moment of need and personalized to an individual’s circumstance. DAU’s responsive learning program would need to produce more and smaller segmented courses — conducted both online and onsite — using advanced learning technologies. In our dynamic and flexible acquisition environment, DAU’s content must build critical-thinking skills and confidence in each learner’s ability to decide and act in order to drive performance excellence. By partnering acquisition subject matter experts with learning science specialists, DAU is developing quality experiences that are personalized, relevant and informed by the best minds in the field.
- A dynamic network that connects people who need information to people who have information. DAU already has scale with its network — it is the only organization connecting all 183,000-plus members of the defense acquisition workforce. DAU is working to intentionally build connections between people who have the knowledge and those who need it for success.
A new brand
Woolsey recognized that DAU needed a logo to reflect these changes and authorized a graphic that could better represent this new direction and alignment.
“DAU has built a culture of support and innovation, and that is a powerful thing,” Woolsey said in “DAU: A Platform for Knowledge,” published by DAU Public Affairs in October 2020. “It is exciting to be part of this transformation and it is important to where we are going. To remind everyone of our new direction, we have further represented this change in the form of a new logo.”
DAU also dropped “Defense Acquisition University” and will simply use the name DAU going forward. This name better reflects the broader nature of what DAU offers the acquisition community beyond classroom training.
While Defense Acquisition University was a school for training, the new DAU brand represents a platform for knowledge. “The logo is more than a redesign … it represents DAU both in terms of our transformation right now and the platform we are developing that is our future,” Woolsey said.
COVID-19: An unanticipated “jump start” for the DAU Learning Platform
In 2020, the world, our nation, the Department of Defense and DAU, in the middle of this transformation, had to pause in response to an unprecedented crisis — the coronavirus. The severity of COVID-19’s international impacts and outbreak conditions — including those rising to the level of a pandemic — have now impacted all aspects of daily life, including travel, trade, tourism, food supplies, financial markets, and learning and development. Starting in March 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic had a huge impact, but it has actually accelerated our ongoing transformation. As an immediate result, all of DAU’s campuses were closed, with faculty and staff directed to work from home virtually. Additionally, all classroom courses and in-person meetings were cancelled and had to be immediately converted to virtual solutions. This disrupted thousands of students and customers, impacting career and certifications requirements worldwide. This could be characterized as a black swan event.
A black swan, according to Investopedia, is an unpredictable event that is beyond what is normally expected of a situation and which has potentially severe consequences. Black swan events are characterized by their extreme rarity, severe impact, and the widespread insistence they were obvious in hindsight.
New opportunities
This disruption, or the “new normal,” imposed huge limitations on movement and in-person engagement. DAU faculty and staff rose to the challenge and, within three weeks, converted all classroom courses to virtual instructor-led formats and delivery.
DAU had to immediately change people and infrastructure from traditional course design and delivery to virtual instructor-led training — or VILT — designs and delivery. We engaged high-performing teams of ISDs, faculty support personnel and IT to rapidly work with instructors to transition to online synchronous formats. We quickly pivoted and avoided cancelling most of the scheduled certification classroom offerings, saving 951 offerings (more than 88 percent of those scheduled) and comprising more than 23,000 students helped (to the great appreciation of our pandemic-impacted workforce).
However, it also opened new opportunities and provided justification for acceleration in the adoption of new tools and technologies to help DAU scale up and reach more students to provide a more learner-centric experience. Looking back at what has worked, DAU faculty and staff have had to adopt collaborative, adaptive and responsive behaviors to foster creativity, build cohesion, and focus on collective strengths and accomplishing common goals. They also must continue to seek alternatives to rapidly develop and deliver learning solutions without sacrificing quality. To ensure we maintained course quality, we leveraged our robust existing course survey system to compare the results of virtual delivery with our previous classroom trends.
Within two short months since the total conversion, by aggressively tracking and rapidly responding with improvements to the new virtual environment to address challenges and problem areas, the results have been outstanding (this would not have happened without metrics and measurement (we would have been “flying blind”):
- End-of-course student feedback surveys (more than 8,000) for our 113 converted VILT offerings are now on a par for excellence with classroom scores (4.34 on a 5 point scale — above 4.0 is “green”)!
- VILT net promotor scores (I would recommend this course to a colleague) have also been “green” (4.30).
- Student feedback in regard to the virtual environment greatly improved, with 93 courses rated “green” or above 4.0.
- Faculty and student primary comments include “need to be able to rapidly redesign VILT offering,” “continue to improve learning-enabling technologies” and “like the convenience and location advantages.”
What is next for DAU?
As the COVID-19 crisis has shown us, we must react quickly and positively, be open to suggestions, and be interested and enthusiastic in our approach to delivering learning. Everyone at DAU and the majority of the acquisition workforce is now teleworking and teaming virtually with great success. This creates a totally new environment at DAU. This disruption jump-started DAU to shift more quickly to distributed and virtual environments, immediately forcing us out of the classroom toward a “learning platform” construct. We can now capitalize on reduced overhead and costs associated with commuting, physical facilities, classrooms and travel, as well as the huge advantages of virtual environments in regard to reach, scale and presence.
DAU is completely reimagining how it develops its content, both in the classroom and through informal learning, to ensure it meets the expectations of the modern audience. Expect shorter learning modules, more informal learning and modern, engaging experiences. Ultimately, much of the learning our students experience will happen while they work rather than in one of DAU’s physical classrooms. DAU will also make greater use of its scale, with open online workshops, online communities and online events that connect our customers with thousands of their acquisition counterparts. The recent virtual TEDxDAU, attended by more than 3,000 people, is an example of the power of scale.
Our continuing experience with extended telework in response to the pandemic has demonstrated that DAU can deliver quality learning in the virtual environment and at a huge increase at reach and scale. DAU is actively working to make these experiences even better by increasing flexibility with more self-paced instruction and designing engaging online exercises to help customers apply new knowledge. With this increase in virtual learning, they will no longer have to be away from their job eight hours a day, for weeks at a time.
By the end of 2021, we will successfully transform DAU to a platform that connects defense acquisition workforce members to all the resources they need with a high-quality, low-friction user experience. Five initial necessary enablers of this transformation derived from DAU’s FY21 Annual Performance Plan include:
- Supporting the restructure of workforce certification requirements impacting our 183,000 acquisition workforce with leaner core training along with the use of credentials for tailored skills development tied to job functions or roles.
- Showing monetary real value of DAU’s products and services and metrics to our customers and stakeholders.
- Reorganizing our infrastructure to optimize DAU to be more effective and efficient by reducing our person-to-person footprint and the costs of delivery and by expanding our online and hybrid offerings and solutions.
- Investing and rapidly implementing online learning platform capabilities.
- Upskilling our faculty and staff by developing and hiring for future-needed skills.
Woolsey has summed up DAU’s learning platform transformation with this visionary statement: “We want to be the acquisition workforce’s provider of choice. In this new world of faster and more relevant training … we want our learning platform to be the place the workforce turns to for the information and resources they need to not only get the job done, but to excel and really make a difference for our Warfighters.”
It is really not only about us, but about our “song” — like an orchestra, we all have a vital part to play and, more important, together harmonize DAU’s new high adventure — the transformation into a “modern learning platform.”
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