Infrastructure Revisited
The physical and intellectual infrastructure of the transportation industry is in a critical state as both have aged rapidly in recent decades. Ironically, this comes at a time when we are going through one of the greatest periods of innovation in transportation — particularly in the transit industry and the focus of this article — since the invention of the automobile, and the need for modernized transportation systems is at an all-time high. (White Paper, Picone, J. & Shaffer, S.)
The Hon. James L. Oberstar, chairman of the U.S. House Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure, stated in Barry B. LePatner’s book: "Too Big To Fall: America’s Failing Infrastructure and the Way Forward," “In recent years, however, the commitment to make long-term surface transportation investments has eroded. In the absence of the political will to make these badly needed investments, we continue to watch as the condition and performance of the system deteriorate and our [America’s] competitive advantage on the world stage slips ... The world-class surface transportation system passed on by previous generations of Americans has reached the age of obsolescence and now needs to be rebuilt.”
A significant, integral and most important part of the rebuilding as suggested will be the refreshing and retraining of transit’s incumbent workforce, together with the training of new recruits with the most efficient and effective training technologies available to the management of our transit agencies. Technology continues to transform education and training in ways unforeseen by its inventors. Learners tutored one-on-one score significantly higher on end-of-course achievement tests than learners taught in one-on-many classrooms. Travel costs and lost productivity (e.g., employee and instructor time away from their jobs) were cited as the two biggest and most expensive barriers to effective training (TRB, Report 84, 2003). By enabling employees to take training in their workspaces and to schedule it around other tasks, the return on investment of online computer-based training increases dramatically.
“Issues of recruitment and retention of employees coupled with the impacts of labor-market conditions and labor-management relations are of critical significance to the viability of public transit. In an era of transit agency restructuring, downsizing, and re-engineering, tailoring jobs to meet the demands of the industry has become a necessity. Demographic, sociological, cultural, and technological changes in both the industry and the national workforce will also have a critical impact on transit’s employment environment. Transportation agencies face an unprecedented level of retirements of senior-level managers over the next decade — nearly double the rate for the nation’s entire workforce. The aging of the nation’s population and workforce — not to mention the aging of America’s infrastructure — are well documented. Keep in mind the Transportation industry accounts for 20 percent of America’s GDP, not the least of which components is National Defense,” as stated in the summary of a prospectus prepared by Northrop Services Inc. in 1980 titled “A New Approach to the Nation’s Transportation Problems.”
Advanced Distributed Learning, Computer-based Training, Intelligent Tutoring Systems
The focus of this article is on interactive instructional technology and causes us to reflect upon revolutions in instruction. Tailoring instruction (education and training) to the needs of individual learners has been found to be an “instructional imperative and an economic impossibility.” (Michael Scriven, 1975). With interactive instructional technology based on computer technology may make tutorial instruction economically practical (Bloom, 1984).
It was James Garfield, the 20th president of the United States when addressing an alumni meeting at Williams College, responded to the question: “What is a university?” His response was: “A university is Mark Hopkins on one end of the log, a student on the other.” [American Authors 1600-1900, p. 384]. How prescient was President Garfield?! If by his “log” answer, President Garfield meant that the ideal teaching-learning model for every student — indeed, for every learner-trainee in our workforce — is to have one’s own graduated professor/teacher/instructor for one’s education and training?
What I am respectfully suggesting is that the computer can be the vehicle to provide that ideal teacher-learner model – the one-to-one correspondence suggested by President Garfield. It psychologically restores the person-to-person, i.e., one-on-one ratio: the teacher on one end of the log [the computer], the learner on the other.
Going further back in history, it was Alexander the Great (B.C. 356-323), son of King Philip of Macedonia and his fourth wife, Olympias, at the age of ten — some historians say fifteen — was given Aristotle as his personal tutor. Objective: On-demand face to face dialogue. Computers, now, make the individualization imperative affordable. (i.e., An Aristotle for Every Alexander).
Marshall McLuhan, coined the term Global Village. He is also author of that famous quip “The medium is the message.” What he is saying is the new (electronic) media have new — and different — grammars and syntaxes. And the school populations (from grade to grad school) — those of the last quarter-century — and before — as well as many in our current workforce, have a huge experience with these new media ‘languages’ — world around, and do not attend to the print culture — by which most of us have learned and with which most of our educational institutions are bound — though emerging from gently. (McLuhan, 1994).
Medicine has been meeting and treating individuals’ physical health needs on an individual basis for centuries. Are we at a place in technology-driven instruction in education [and training] for learning psychologists to do the same for differentials in learning styles, i.e., differentials in cognitive processing of information?
Research has determined that learners tutored one-on-one score about two standard deviations higher on end-of-course achievement tests than learners taught in one-on-many classrooms. Educational structure and organization, in its grossest sense, have not changed in hundreds of years. (Baker, Eva L., O’Neil, Harold F., Jr., 1994).
Broadly speaking, computer-based training (CBT) has enjoyed a modicum of success in certain areas of America’s workforce. There is a plethora of research studies that suggest that it has proven to cut training time by as much as 70 percent with gains in learning gains of more than 50 percent. Make no mistake, CBT has its detractors as well. Here is partial laundry-list of some of the perceived disadvantages:
- Students must be motivated to use CBT programs
- CBT is ideally suited for only 40% of the population
- Topic is presented in one way only, no other points of view available
- May be no Subject-matter expert available to answer questions
- The up-front hardware/software investment for the high-end multimedia CBT packages can be expensive
- Programs, by necessity, appeal to the lowest common denominator in the audience to be trained
- May be little hands-on training for hardware/mechanical tasks
- Difficult to retain a learner’s interest for long, complex technical programs
- Limited number of different styles of training (Whitehouse, D., Pellegrin, G., IEEE, 1995).
Job aids of all sorts and in many forms have been introduced into most engineering-oriented (and other) training environments (Fulbright, Terrell, 1993) to help the worker work better, i.e., to increase one’s effectiveness and efficiency — and productivity.4 (Gilbert, 1996).
This writer, during his career produced many job [performance] aids (JPA). JPAs as a concept have been around since the 1940s — used extensively during WWII to train military personnel in a smart and effective manner. It has been modified, expanded, and redesigned and introduced by personnel of SEA Inc. as a “head tool” to help users and other workers who must retain access to large amounts of information to perform accurately. The JPA is as I have produced them is a print document.
Technical trainers should consider JPAs — most especially the computer — before training and use them as tools for employee performance improvement when some or all of the following criteria are met:
- The performance is relatively difficult
- The performance is executed infrequently
- The performance does not have to be done very quickly
- The consequences of imperfect performance are serious
- The environment does not impede the use of the JPA
- Performers do not have reasons to avoid using a JPA
Another aspect of the problems is the overall performance equation and must also be given serious consideration. Any change of technical information and/or of training will be viewed by some as being unnecessary. This resistance to such changes tends to be a “natural” response of organizations, regardless of the motivation for such changes.
Findings from many studies across different subject matters suggest a “rule of thirds,” indicating that interactive instructional technology, i.e., computer-based training, can:
- “Reduce the cost of instruction by about one-third and also either,
- Reduce the time of instruction by about one-third and/or
- Increase learning by about one-third.” (Dodd P., Fletcher, J.D., 2004)
A CBT program utilizes some or all of the following resources: text, graphics, video and sound.
One of the objectives of this article is to promote the increased use of the Internet to become the primary medium for delivering training. Some of our more advanced institutions are designing programs and courses to be delivered to and by the cellphone, and various other devices. Our devices change not only what we do but also who we are.
This writer is collaborating with Temple University, a major American University located in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Together, we are dedicated to exclusively addressing the technical training needs of the transit industry — and these needs should and can be met cost-effectively and cost-beneficially, and addressed, again exclusively by e-learning techniques; and we believe we can become the leader of excellence in the design, development and delivery of computer-based training programs as an integral part of a blended curriculum for the maintenance workforce of and for the transit industry.
We respectfully petition the top-level management and first-line supervisors and/or directors of training in all transit agencies to seriously consider gradually integrating CBT programs with other training delivery methodologies — to accomplish a truly blended curriculum — and begin to make their own comparative-effectiveness analyses. Make no mistake about it the semantic web is intended to imbue information available on the Web with sufficient meaning to improve substantially the cooperation between computers and human beings — to continue to advance an already a thriving automated economy — as we partner with our machines.
Training Economics, the Key to Success
The decision to embark on an advanced distributed learning project, i.e., e-learning-driven projects, will be an economic one. If one can economically justify the approach, then management will in all probability agree and fund the project. There is no single strategy which will leverage a greater return on investment than employee training.
Meanwhile, new technologies offer hope for more effective ways of teaching and learning, but also engender confusion and even fear; too often the shiny new technology is used as little more than window dressing. The cost is the biggest fear factor in most agencies when considering the integration of CBT as a part of the training delivery system. The cost comparison that training managers must make is the cost of providing a CBT program for training vs. the cost to them to send — say 20 employees away for a three-day training course versus what it would cost to provide CBT program to accomplish the same task.
A Final Comment
In our pursuit of growth, we have forgotten about our existing transportation system, which in many instances dates back over a hundred years and is the connective tissue that enables the movement of our nation’s commerce as well as the traveling public. And in the process, we have begun to choke on congestion that ties up our roads and impacts our economy, as it adds untold environmental pressures on a nation struggling to control its addiction to the automobile.
As a measure of how dangerous the condition of these public assets has become, the American Society of Civil Engineers [www.asce.org] issued a devastating report in 2009, which concluded that the overall condition of our nation’s infrastructure — including its dams, wastewater treatment plants, power grid, and bridges — deserves a grade of no higher than D.6.
