The Senior Enlisted Academy is one of the Navy's most prestigious professional enlisted training opportunities. This course prepares selected members of the Navy's senior enlisted community (E-8's and E-9's) for greater professional responsibility and opportunity, and attendance is considered to be career enhancing. Until now, it has been extremely difficult for members of the Naval Reserve to attend the course and gain entry into the ranks of SEA alumni. The course of instruction takes nine weeks, while most reservists are limited to a two week Annual Training (AT) period each year.
The convergence of several distributed learning support technologies has enabled the creation of a Senior Enlisted Academy Non-Resident Course that leverages asynchronous distributed learning with a resident training component to achieve training equivalent to the Senior Enlisted Academy for Naval Reserve personnel. The Naval Reserve Professional Development Center, New Orleans, and the Naval Education and Training Professional Development and Technology Center, Pensacola, have developed a facilitated Interactive Multimedia Instruction/Web Based Training course of instruction to be taken at home by reservists. This Distributed Learning (DL) component comprises seven weeks of instruction, to be completed in a five-month period. At the conclusion of the DL component, reservists will report to NRPDC, New Orleans, for a concluding two-week resident training component, which will contain those portions of the course unsuitable for delivery as DL.
Special consideration was given to creating numerous collaborative activities in the course to foster the same sense of community and cooperation among the course participants as that experienced by those attending the 9-week course. This was particularly challenging due to the necessity to ensure all activities were performed asynchronously to accommodate the variable schedules of reservists. This facilitated IMI/WBT hybrid course could potentially become a model for delivery of other professional or technical training, extending the range of educational opportunities for both reservists and active duty personnel.