Officer Professional Military Education: a New Distance Learning Evolution

Socrates famously wrote, Education is the kindling of a flame, not the filling of a vessel. As military officers, we must continue to hone our craft through career-long learning. This means having a meaningful, relevant, dynamic, and accessible non-resident program for Officer Professional Military Education OPME. This paper will outline a design evolution to bring OPME up to the state of the art in blended learning, to include multi-platform, multidomain, and multimedia solutions that come together forming a cohesive education construct. Centered around a core curriculum, this program will exist in 4-year cycles from the date of commissioning, with officers adding electives from a diverse array of schools and programs with the cycle culminating in a Personal Interaction Milestone, or PIM, at the completion of each cycle. The PIM acts as a short internship or interdisciplinary learning opportunity offered as a carrot every four years. At the end of each cycle, officers who have met certain elective thresholds can even earn an advanced academic degree from Air University. The main objective, however, remains an establishment of quality career-long professional military education for the Total Force. As the mandatory piece of OPME, the core curriculum comprises approximately 12 credit hours worth of material to learn in the span of four years. This gives ample opportunity for officers in every career field to complete the requirements. The elective piece can provide additional credits toward advanced academic degrees or professional certifications, or it can purely serve to meet the desires of certain officers who wish to broaden their cognitive diversity.