The COVID-19 pandemic impacted a wide range of military operations. However, training centers, whose operational model centers around students from across the country traveling to a single location for resident courses, were significantly impacted. To cope, the delivery of many courses was rapidly transitioned from resident to remote by way of video conferencing. Such was the case with the Coast Guard’s Marine Casualty Investigating Officer Course (IOC).

Yet until recently, there was no tool available to analyze and compare the impact of this transition on the course’s immersiveness and educational fidelity. Enter Ruscella’s and Obeid’s (2021) Taxonomy for Immersive Experience Design. The taxonomy presents various elements that contribute to the design of an effective immersive experience and establishes dimensions for each of these elements. Ruscella and Obeid (2021) posit their taxonomy allows designers to sequence an immersive experience, facilitating the objective comparison between experiential design and the strategic modification of those designs to achieve a specific level of immersiveness based on the environment’s terminal objective(s). Proposed in 2021, there is no literature testing the taxonomy’s application within an actual learning environment. This paper will do just that.

The Coast Guard’s IOC, designed around the tenants of the experiential learning theory, relies heavily on scenario-driven training modules and roleplaying. By applying the Taxonomy for Immersive Experience Design, this paper analyzes and compares the effectiveness of the IOC’s pre-COVID-19 resident and COVID- 19 remote courses. It objectively identifies immersiveness gaps between the two courses that translate to the remote IOC’s inability to deliver the authentic and immersive experience necessary to facilitate experiential learning. Further exercising the taxonomy, the paper argues that specific immersive technologies can be strategically implemented within a new virtual IOC to erase the identified immersiveness gap and create an immersive learning environment whose pedagogical benefits surpass that of its resident counterpart.

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Military Rank John Botti