United States Distance Learning Association

about wanting to develop a competent
corps of officers or leaders, then what they
have to provide them, in different parts of
their career, is learning opportunities in
which they truly address the priorities or
core competencies, with more than just
knowledge of an actual experience, and
skill in applying what we think are the critical
learning outcomes of our resident education.
And the Corps, of course, agreed. So
they provided the money, which is always
the showstopper. The second part of that,
of transforming, literally, our box of books
to a seminar-based environment, was to
find the time for students to do it. Because
if you’re doing asynchronous, or just a box
of books, and you have a five-year construct
or window to do it in, you do it
whenever you find time to do it. When
you start getting into a more regimented
seminar, 2-year construct, we start getting
into a more personal time, because it’s a
tighter window, and it’s more disciplined
and more focused, too. You all meet once a
week during the school year.…
So we had to fight that whole issue. And
then the other issue that goes along with
that is finding a corps of course developers—or
we call them course directors—
who can build the courses in a comprehensive
way that are useful in a seminar environment.
PROMMASIT: Have you had much
resistance from any sides, like people who
maybe preferred the box of books, since it
was easier and didn’t take as much work,
per se
ORNDORFF: Or didn’t want to spend
the money, or other areas of resistance as
well
VAN ZUMMEREN: I think that we
have found minimal resistance, if at all.
And part of it is, that myself, Terry Kerrigan
the director, and a bunch of my faculty
are all retired Marines or retired military.
We’re all graduates of our resident programs.
We’ve all been instructors at the
resident programs. We’ve all been commanders.
So we all have a sense of the
impact of what resident education does,
and we’ve all had officers working for us
who have been nonresident graduates or
the box of books graduates and saw the
deficiency.
I would argue that most of the senior
leadership of the Marine Corps, when we
started briefing the seminar opportunity,
agreed with us. Now we started the seminar—voluntary
seminar program—which
you could be a “box of books” [student] or
take the seminar option; 1998 was the first
seminar. So by the time we got to 2004, we
had significant amount of feedback from
instructors and from students about the
value of doing this. Commanders [were]
saying, “You know, the graduates coming
from the seminar thing They’re way
ahead of the box of books, and they’re
almost like a resident graduate.”
PROMMASIT: What great validation.
VAN ZUMMEREN: It was. But again,
most of it’s a living experience, and so it
wasn’t that big of a deal to do that, and of
course we believe in it, so when we brief
these things, we have a little bit of passion.
But the Corps agrees. That’s why we got
the green light to start, this coming October,
for our Command Staff School for
majors, the all seminar only distance program,
which is significant—there is no
more box of books for them. Which means
that we had to [ask ourselves]—if we’re
not doing a box of books, then how can we
touch all our officers worldwide, in very
high up-tempo environment
And the way we can touch them is
using Blackboard as really the backbone,
our learning support system, to be able to
touch all students, regardless if you’re
doing on-site traditional seminars, or if
you’re going to do online asynchronous
seminars. Either way, you’ve all got to
come in through Blackboard. And the only
time that the difference is obvious is if
you’re doing purely online, Blackboard
will be your total environment, period. But
of course the Corps has had the patience,
90 Distance Learning Volume 4, Issue 4