As an organization that promotes training and education, the U.S. Army strives to ensure that its Soldiers are constantly improving performance throughout their careers. The fundamental experience for a Soldier is an operational assignment. Army units, however, are facing a growing challenge in planning, developing, and implementing training needed for full spectrum readiness in the contemporary operational environment while still maintaining core competencies. The rate of change in the modern operational environment requires U.S. Army trainers to deliver effective training in less time than ever before. Research and development to support Soldier training therefore must explore not only advanced learning environments and instructional strategies but also advanced training-development processes. Advanced training-development processes may enable the rapid generation of training activities that are responsive to immediate training needs. Thus, research and development was initiated to create a "one stop" solution to enable the creation, delivery, and management of web-enabled multimedia training exercises.

This paper presents an overview of the Army training and education process; describes methods for relieving the constraints on rapid, contextualized training development; presents behavioral research to examine the target user characteristics and likely user environment; and discusses the development of structured training templates, generic base content, and tools to increase the speed with which unit trainers can create quality training products. Further, the development and evaluation of a flexible training development tool is presented. Evaluation of the tool was conducted using Soldiers from Fort Hood and Fort Carson. Results from the evaluation were favorable, indicating that trainers would use the tool to rapidly develop interactive multimedia exercises for individuals and small groups, and suggest that the tool will support the creation of training exercises for a wide variety of critical task, skills, and behaviors. In addition, research on other initiatives to develop rapid training development tools will be introduced and discussed.