Enhancing critical thinking skills for Army leaders using blended-learning methods2013

The U.S. Army's Command and General Staff School offers its Advanced Operations Course (AOC) for junior field-grade officers using both traditional resident instruction and a model referred to as blended distributed learning (BDL). The BDL course lasts 12 months and uses a variety of information and communication technologies to support synchronous and asynchronous collaboration among students and instructors entirely at a distance, with most students completing the course on discretionary time. This report assesses the effectiveness of AOC-BDL based on student and graduate surveys and identifies best practices for BDL from empirical research and case studies. Results show that the course has a number of strengths and that students were generally satisfied with the course. However, student...