The Air Force’s new blended learning construct that combines digital and in-person education will put the emphasis back on the learner, CMSAF James Cody told reporters at AFA’s Air & Space Conference in National Harbor, Md., on Wednesday. “We have worked diligently over decades to build the brick-and-mortar system that we have today; it is a high-quality level of education that we provide for our airmen, but it is now beginning to lag,” he said. The new approach will allow airmen to master academic content on their own and focus on experiential learning during their actual in-residence periods, he said. “In a classroom, it’s instructor-centric. … But at the end of that session … it’s over,” said Cody. “With distance learning, it’s learner-centric,” he said.
The Defense Innovation Unit is gearing up for the first flight of its commercially developed hypersonic testbed as soon as the end of February—part of a larger project to quickly increase the cadence of the Pentagon’s hypersonic flight testing and field advanced, high-speed systems and components at scale.
