How have the professional requirements for military officers changed over the years, and what is the connection between skills training and academic education in the military context of officer education?
NATO C2COE Staff Officer MAJ Steven Hornstra (NLD A) BEd, MSc, addresses these questions in his recently published article titled ‘Instructional Design Linking Military Training and Academic Education for Officer Cadets: A Scoping Review.’ This article is featured in the fourth issue of this year’s Journal of Military and Strategic Studies. In addition to Steven, the research team includes LTC Dr. Jaap Hoogenboezem (NLD A), Prof. Dr. Steven Durning, and Prof. Dr. Walther van Mook.
As a result of civil-military operations and hybrid warfare, strategic thinking becomes increasingly important for officer cadets, necessitating ever more academic education at a military academy. For officer education, several efforts have been made to close the gap between the traditional training of military skills and the academic education. Until now, little attention has been paid to instructional design as a means of linking military training and academic education. Consequently, we make a plea for an innovative integrated instructional design (ID) model for both military training and academic education, based on an ID model for military skills training and an ID model for academic education. Before we actually designed that integrated model, we needed to know if these two ID models have not previously been integrated. Our scoping review confirms that these two models have not been integrated yet.
Read the article at JMSS: https://jmss.org/article/view/76275/57091
