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The Collective Innovative Training Environment (xCITE) event, on 9 March, explored personalised and distributed learning by combining QinetiQ’s human performance research with three training capabilities from academia and Small and Medium-sized Enterprises (SMEs):

Adaptive learning
As students take their training online, the system learns from their strengths and weaknesses and adapts the pace and content to their individual needs to accelerate their progress. (SME:CogBooks)

Gamification
Learners engage with digital content using competitive gaming elements – challenging themselves or others, receiving rewards and becoming active participants rather than passively receiving information. (SME: Gamification Nation)

Virtual Reality
The learner puts on goggles to enter an immersive virtual world with their team – in this case a submarine – where they can interact with colleagues and rehearse potentially life-threatening scenarios in safety. (SME: Immerse Learning)

The demonstrations focused on training for both new and experienced submariners, showing how navies could bring down costs by expediting learning and improve platform availability for operations by reducing the amount of sea time required for training.

Helen Dudfield, Chief Scientist for Training & Human Performance, QinetiQ, said: “As technology drives social and cultural change, training styles must keep up with shifting generational attitudes and expectations. Rigid training in fixed workspaces will make way for courses that offer the flexibility to learn wherever and whenever is convenient. Most importantly, technology can vastly improve the quality of learning by tailoring courses to students’ individual competencies and circumstances. Employers can reap the rewards of a highly skilled workforce at lower risk, and be confident of an excellent return on their investment in their people.”

The event was supported by Dr Ioannis Paraskevopoulos, Senior Lecturer in Disruptive Technologies at the University of Greenwich, on secondment to QinetiQ thanks to a £30,000 award from the Royal Academy of Engineering. More on Dr Paraskevopoulos, his research and Industrial Fellowship at QinetiQ can be found here.

The techniques on display at the xCITE event could also be used across all the Armed Forces, in high-risk industry, in schools, universities, hospitals, at home, or for corporate training.

Notes for Editors:

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