Training managers in the Air Force and the other military services also have methods to view and understand a
curriculum. The most common method takes the form of a comprehensive syllabus plan that contains all the necessary information for a course or curriculum: lesson title, lesson description, prerequisites, number of total hours, and type of training media. Even though the information is contained in one document, it is not an efficient or fluid way to view and diagnose a full curriculum, Figure 3 shows a notional program flow summary of a syllabus for
training intelligence operators in the Air Force. At the top of Figure 3 is a breakdown of the academic, part-task
training, and full-mission training hours by program schedule. This includes dedicated hours for web-based
fundamentals (ADL—Advanced Distributed Learning), in-residence hours for fundamentals on days 1-3, and in-
residence hours for operators training on days 3-19. The bottom of Figure 3 shows specific lessons, number of hours
for each lesson, and the assignment of lessons to both days and type of training format (academics, part-task
training, full-mission training). Only days 1-5 are shown in this example. The combined picture of the intelligence
operator training does show the learning professional the total number of hours in this syllabus and how those hours
are divided among two dimensions: days and type of training format. In the complete syllabus document, each
lesson title is listed along with a description of the lesson. What is missing for the learning professional and other training decision-makers is a way to dynamically manipulate this information. Although much of the information in this example syllabus could be represented in a spreadsheet, that type of view is still very limiting.