In 1984, I was a 17-year-old civil servant, a teenager in a primarily male-dominated workforce; in the 1980s, this was a recipe for disaster. I was sexually harassed several times and suffered one physical attack—in the workplace, where I should have been safe and free to learn without being fearful. We have come a long way since 1984! Today's Zero Tolerance Policy has been effective in changing the culture of the 1980s. However, it is our responsibility to do everything possible to ensure Zero Tolerance is not just the goal or, worse, a catchphrase but the reality for every single Airman. There is a cost for this level of training. Nonetheless, we cannot afford the price of even one big-A Airman suffering from sexual assault or harassment.
Airmen receive state-of-the-art training for hard skills, such as piloting, maintaining, and sustaining billion-dollar weapon systems. The Air Force misses the mark when training soft skills, such as leadership, communication, listening, adaptability, teamwork, ethics, and respectful behavior. Understanding the nuances of Sexual Assault and Prevention (SAPR) training is more than the explicit, illegal behavior of physical assault; this training must teach the gray areas of harassment and prevention. Those gray areas include teaching consequential behavior, respect, reading body language, and many more skills not conveyed by PowerPoint presentations. Today’s digitally native workforce is most comfortable online, making soft training skills more critical than ever (Hansen 2018).
The standard training method for SAPR is low-tech and non-immersive. This paper contends that the Air Force would improve SAPR training by employing immersive learning techniques. This paper will utilize Ruscella's and Obeid's Taxonomy for Immersive Experience Design chart (2021) to measure the effectiveness between PowerPoint training and several immersive experiential training methods. The result will provide evidence to support the investment in immersive technologies to improve programs across the Department of Defense.
Keywords
360 VIDEO, AUGMENTED AND VIRTUAL REALITY (AR/VR), DISTANCE LEARNING, IMMERSIVE, MIXED REALITY, TEAM TRAINING
Additional Keywords
Sexual Assault and Prevention (SAPR), SAPR, Immersive Taxonomy Chart