Distributed Learning: The Power of a Virtual Academy
The continued aim to provide military training that is faster, better and cheaper, means that UK and other international armed forces are looking to how best new technology can enable training transformation. The development of virtual environments, such as virtual academies, offers a way of addressing the suggestion that less time is going to be spent in the school room, and more in potentially isolated learning environments, like home, barracks, and the front line. Students who have been more rapidly deployed, and yet have time on their hands, now have the ability to interact (and socialise) with friends, team members, ex-students, and tutors, independent of location.
What is a virtual academy?
 A virtual academy provides somewhere for geographically remote students and instructors to gather together so that learning can take place. It provides a media-rich environment which supports both individual and collaborative, social learning, and enables distributed ed users to access and interact with complex learning content in an innovative and cost-effective fashion.
What can virtual academies achieve?
VEGA believes that virtual academies will be one of the ways in which training establishments will be looking to deliver learning and so improve capability and capacity in the very near future.
VEGA has identified the following as some of the potential learning benefits offered by a virtual academy:
- Delivering training globally without the need for additional real estate
- Creating a purpose-built learning environment to foster better, cheaper and faster training
- Delivering a variety of media-rich training experiences to a distributed student base with the built in provision of extra-curricular / supportive / peer to peer type learning engagements in additional to formal training
- Facilitating an environment for alumni and networking activities
- Learning can become a collaborative effort between learners from locations all over the world
- Alumni network to provide continued instructor and peer to peer support on the job
VEGA's experience with virtual academies
 VEGA built a virtual academy concept demonstrator for ITEC 2008, which the company used to trial the delivery of different training engagements within a virtual environment.
More broadly, VEGA helps its clients understand when, why and how learning can improve their operational capability and then achieve it. As experts in learning best practice, VEGA is conversant in all the latest training technological enablers, using the most appropriate COTS technologies to deliver effective training architectures for the client.
VEGA can create bespoke virtual academies in line with an individual training establishment’s specific requirement, and then integrate the required mix of COTS training toolsets with which students can interact. This includes the insertion of many of the technology-based training solutions on which VEGA has built its reputation. VEGA can therefore:
- Facilitate bringing the virtual and real worlds together – we can tie virtual worlds in to a customer’s existing applications and processes.
- Integrate real processes with virtual practice. We can offer new perspectives in examining company knowledge and organisational learning by making it explicit in a virtual context.
To further enhance VEGA's virtual academy offering, VEGA is one of the UK’s leading Government accredited information assurance providers and so is an ideal partner with whom to discuss the security implications inherent in the development of virtual environments.
Internal links relating to virtual academies
 A vision for virtual academies
ITEC 2008
Human Performance Improvement
Maintenance Training
Web-based emulation fact sheet
External links relating to virtual academies
Wonderland blog
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