The training and education domain is rapidly evolving. New capabilities, such as AI and data science, combined with a growing understanding of cognition, neuroscience, and educational theory are transforming the ways we learn. What are the implications for defense organizations, and what are military stakeholders’ perceptions of them? These were the questions posed to our Technical Cooperation Program (TTCP) technical panel.

The TTCP is a multinational R&D cooperative for Five Eyes countries, i.e., Australia, Canada, New Zealand, United Kingdom, and the United States. This paper, written by the national delegates from each nation on the TTCP Future Defence Learning Technical Panel, describes work undertaken to analyze emerging learning approaches, compare international military perspectives on them, and identify opportunities for related multinational coordination.  

Specifically, this paper will showcase findings from the group’s learning trends study. We began by broadly evaluating emerging methods and technologies for education and training from industry, academia, and defense institutions. We identified 25 distinct trends, such as individualized personal learning, learning through social media, and ebooks as a learning platform. These trends were clustered into four categories: Learning Design, Learning Delivery, Enabling and Managing Learning, and Learning at Scale. After synthesizing the trends, we developed a survey to gauge our respective militaries’ perceptions of them according to interest, level of current adoption, and estimated time for future adoption. From these results, we then evaluated our own organizations against these learning trends and comparatively across the nations.  Finally, we identified ways to individually and collaboratively modernize our training and education enterprises, accordingly.

This paper presents the group’s findings, including the background research, survey and subsequent results, and analysis. The paper also summarizes findings on how coalition military partners can achieve shared goals in innovating their learning approaches. (NOTE TO REVIEWERS: ALL DATA HAVE BEEN COLLECTED AND ANALYZED!)