Royal Army College

Lesson Overview

The systems approach in the lessons before this one is general; it would be taught, in much the same shape, to a course designer in any army. This lesson is particular, because the Royal Kaharagian Army is not any army: it is small, young, dispersed, largely part-time, and modestly resourced, and a course designed as a large, well-funded, full-time force would design it cannot actually be delivered here. Designing good training for a small force is its own discipline, and it is the discipline this College lives by. This lesson teaches it: how to design training that fits the real means of a small force, how to blend asynchronous online study with in-person instruction, and how to build courses lean enough to be delivered, and sustained, by the few people and the limited time and money the Army actually has.

The governing principle is plain and unforgiving: a course that cannot be delivered is not a good design, however excellent on paper. The best-designed course in the world is worthless to a small force if it requires more instructors, more time, more money, or more equipment than the force can find, because it will simply never run, or will run once and collapse. So for a small force, deliverability is not a constraint applied after design; it is a design criterion from the start, woven in alongside the objectives. The art is to design training that genuinely produces the capability the need requires within the means the force actually has, which usually means designing differently from a large force, leaning hard on asynchronous self-study, reserving scarce in-person time for what only it can do, reusing and simplifying ruthlessly, and building courses a small staff can sustain over years.

This is the knowledge layer. It teaches you the constraints of a small force, the blended model that fits them, what belongs online and what must be in person, and the principles of lean, sustainable course design, so that you can design training that this Army can actually deliver. The judgement of where exactly to draw the line between online and in-person for a given course, and how lean is lean enough, is built by designing and running real courses in the small-force context under a qualified designer and signed off. Read this to know how a small force designs training; the judgement is built in the doing.

By the end you will be able to explain why deliverability is a design criterion for a small force, design within its real constraints of people, time, money, and dispersion, build a blended course that combines asynchronous online study with in-person instruction, decide what belongs online and what must be in person, and design lean, reusable, sustainable courses a small staff can keep running.

Key Terms

Small force: an army that is small, here also young, dispersed, largely part-time, and modestly resourced, whose limited means shape what training it can deliver.
Deliverability: whether a designed course can actually be run with the people, time, money, and resources the force has; a design criterion, not an afterthought.
Blended learning: training that combines asynchronous online self-study with in-person instruction, using each for what it does best.
Asynchronous learning: self-paced study a learner does in their own time, without an instructor present, such as the College's online courses; scalable and cheap to deliver, but limited in what it can teach.
In-person instruction: training delivered face to face with an instructor present, needed for skills, practice, sign-off, and the lived experience of soldiering; scarce and costly, so reserved for what only it can do.
Resource-lean design: designing a course to need as little instructor time, money, equipment, and overhead as possible while still meeting its objectives.
Reuse: building training from shared, common components used across many courses, rather than creating everything afresh, to save effort and ease sustainment.
Sustainability: the quality of a course that a small staff can keep running and current over years, rather than one that runs once and decays.
Sign-off: the in-person confirmation by a qualified person that a learner has actually demonstrated a skill, which asynchronous study cannot provide.
Cooperation: drawing on partners, shared standards, and open material to extend a small force's reach beyond what it could build alone.

Why deliverability is a design criterion

In a large, well-resourced force, a designer can largely assume the means to deliver a sound design will be found: instructors, time, facilities, and money are constraints, but generous ones, and a good design will usually be resourced. In a small force that assumption is false and dangerous. Here the means are genuinely scarce, a handful of qualified instructors, members with little spare time, modest money, limited equipment, and people spread across distances, and a course that needs more than the force has will not be delivered, no matter how good it is. The graveyard of small-force training is full of excellent courses that were designed for a force three times the size and never ran twice.

This flips an assumption a general course-design education can leave unexamined: that you design the best course and then resource it. For a small force you design the best course the force can actually deliver and sustain, which is a different and often harder problem, because it forces hard choices about what to teach in person, what to push online, what to cut, and what to reuse. Deliverability becomes a design criterion alongside the objectives, applied from the first: as the designer writes the design, they ask continually not only "does this meet the objective?" but "can this Army actually run this, repeatedly, with what it has?" A design that fails the second question is not finished, however well it passes the first.

The reward for designing within the means is training that actually happens, year after year, producing real capability, which is worth far more than a brilliant design that never runs. And the constraint, taken positively, drives good design: the discipline of fitting a small force's means pushes the designer toward clarity, simplicity, reuse, and the sharp separation of what truly needs an instructor from what does not, all of which tend to make training better as well as cheaper. The rest of this lesson is how that is done.

The blended model

The central technique for delivering good training in a small force is blended learning: combining asynchronous online self-study with in-person instruction, and using each for exactly what it does best. This is not a compromise forced by poverty but a genuinely strong design, because the two modes have complementary strengths, and a blend can deliver more, to more people, for less, than either alone. It is the model this College is built on, and understanding it is central to designing for the Army.

Asynchronous online study is the College's courses: self-paced lessons a member works through in their own time, without an instructor present. Its strengths are exactly what a small, dispersed, part-time force needs: it is scalable (one course serves any number of learners at no extra instructor cost), cheap to deliver (no instructor time per learner), flexible (learners study when and where they can, around their other commitments), and consistent (every learner gets the same well-designed lesson, with none of the variation between instructors). For the knowledge layer of almost any subject, the understanding, the principles, the facts, the why, asynchronous study is ideal, and it is where the College puts the bulk of its teaching.

In-person instruction is the scarce, costly mode: face-to-face training with a qualified instructor present. Because it consumes the thing the small force has least of, qualified-instructor time gathered with learners in one place, it is reserved for what only it can do, rather than spent on what online study could have carried. What only in-person can do is the subject of the next section, but in essence it is the physical skills, the supervised practice, the sign-off, and the lived team experience that a screen cannot deliver. The blend, then, is to teach the knowledge asynchronously, online, to everyone, cheaply and consistently, and to use the precious in-person time only for the skills, practice, and confirmation that genuinely require it, which is exactly how the College's courses are structured: study online, certified in person.

   THE BLENDED MODEL  (use each mode for what it does best)

   ASYNCHRONOUS ONLINE          IN-PERSON
   ---------------------------  ---------------------------
   scalable (any number, no     scarce and costly (instructor
     extra instructor cost)       time + learners gathered)
   cheap, flexible, consistent  RESERVE for what only it can do
   ideal for KNOWLEDGE: the     the SKILLS, supervised PRACTICE,
     understanding, principles,   SIGN-OFF, and lived team
     facts, the why               experience a screen can't give
   ---------------------------  ---------------------------
   The College's model: STUDY ONLINE, CERTIFIED IN PERSON.
   Teach the knowledge online to all, cheaply; spend in-person time
   only on what genuinely needs it.

What belongs online, and what must be in person

The key design decision in a blended course is the line between what is taught asynchronously online and what is reserved for in-person instruction, and drawing it well is most of the art. The principle is to push everything online that online can genuinely teach, and reserve in-person time only for what truly requires it, because in-person time is the binding constraint and every hour of it spent on something online could have carried is an hour stolen from something that needed it.

Online can genuinely teach the knowledge layer: understanding a subject, its principles, its method, the why and the what, the things that can be learned by reading, thinking, and answering questions. A great deal of soldiering's knowledge, the law, the theory, the procedures, the background, the decision-making frameworks, can be taught this way well, and the College's courses prove it. Online study can also prepare a learner for in-person training, so that the scarce face-to-face time is spent practising rather than first explaining, which multiplies its value.

In-person is required for the things a screen cannot deliver, and these are real and not to be faked. Physical skills are built by doing under correction (TRG 301): you cannot learn to handle a weapon, apply a dressing, or drill a movement from a screen, only the knowledge about them. Supervised practice and coaching, the watching and correcting that turn knowledge into skill, need an instructor present. Sign-off, the confirmation by a qualified person that a learner has actually demonstrated a skill to standard, cannot be done online, which is why the College's skills are "certified in person" however much is studied online; a course cannot honestly certify a physical competence on the strength of a screen alone. And the lived experience of soldiering as a team, the airsoft milsim exercise, the field experience, the pressure and friction of working together, is by its nature in-person. The designer reserves the scarce in-person time for exactly these, and ruthlessly pushes everything else online, which is how a small force gets the most capability from the least face-to-face time.

Lean, reusable, sustainable design

Beyond the blend, designing for a small force means designing lean: needing as little instructor time, money, equipment, and overhead as possible while still meeting the objectives. Every demand a course makes on the force's scarce resources is a reason it might not run or might not last, so the lean designer questions every such demand: does this really need an instructor, or could it be online? does it really need this equipment, or a simpler substitute? does it really need this much time? The aim is not cheapness for its own sake but deliverability and sustainment, a course light enough that the force can actually run it, again and again, without exhausting the few people who deliver it.

Reuse is one of the most powerful levers. Rather than building every course from nothing, a small force builds from shared, common components, common lesson formats, common assessment styles, shared standards, material reused across courses, so that effort spent once serves many courses and the whole catalogue is easier to build and maintain. The College's uniform lesson shape and house standard are exactly this: a common template that makes every course quicker to write, easier to keep consistent, and simpler for a small staff to sustain. A designer working in a small force designs for reuse deliberately, building components that other courses can share rather than one-off creations.

Sustainability is the long view: a course must be one that a small staff can keep running and keep current over years, not one that runs brilliantly once and then decays because no one has the time to maintain it. A course that depends on one irreplaceable expert, on equipment that cannot be kept up, or on more maintenance effort than the staff can spare, is not sustainable however good its first running. So the designer designs for the staff who will sustain it: simple enough to maintain, documented enough to hand over (Lesson 07), built of reusable parts, and light enough to keep current as doctrine and kit change. And where the force's own means fall short, the designer looks to cooperation, drawing on partners, shared or open standards, and material from others, to extend the small force's reach beyond what it could build and sustain alone, a theme the small-state defence courses (PME 510) develop. The small force that designs lean, reuses hard, builds for sustainment, and cooperates where it can, delivers far more training than its size alone would suggest, which is exactly what a young Army needs.

In Practice: Designing a Course This Army Can Actually Run

A course designer of the Royal Army College is given a need and must design a course to meet it for an Army that is small, dispersed, largely part-time, and modestly resourced. A designer trained only in the general systems approach might design an excellent full-time, instructor-led course, sound on paper and impossible to deliver here. The College's designer designs for the force that actually exists.

She treats deliverability as a design criterion from the first, asking of every part not only "does this meet the objective?" but "can this Army run this, repeatedly, with what it has?" She designs it blended: the whole knowledge layer, the understanding, principles, and procedures, goes into asynchronous online lessons in the College's standard shape, scalable to any number of dispersed members, studied in their own time, consistent for all, and costing no instructor time per learner. She reserves the scarce in-person time strictly for what only it can do: the physical skills, the supervised practice, the sign-off that a qualified person has seen the skill done to standard, and any team experience the course needs. She draws the online/in-person line ruthlessly, pushing everything online that online can teach and using face-to-face time only where a screen genuinely cannot reach, and she has the online study prepare learners for the in-person phase so that scarce time is spent practising, not first explaining.

Then she designs lean and sustainable: reusing the College's common lesson and assessment components rather than building from nothing, questioning every demand on instructors, money, and equipment, and building the course so a small staff can keep it running and current over years and hand it over (Lesson 07) when she moves on. Where the Army's own means fall short, she looks to shared standards and partners. The course she produces is not the grandest possible; it is the best course this Army can actually deliver and sustain, which is worth infinitely more than a brilliant design that never runs twice. That is designing for a small force, and it is the discipline that lets a young, modestly resourced Army field a real College at all.

Check Your Understanding

Explain why "a course that cannot be delivered is not a good design" for a small force, and why deliverability must be a design criterion from the start rather than a constraint applied after design. How does this differ from the assumption a general course-design education can leave unexamined?
Describe the blended model and the complementary strengths of asynchronous online study and in-person instruction. Why is the blend a genuinely strong design and not just a compromise forced by poverty, and what is the College's expression of it?
Set out the principle for deciding what belongs online and what must be in person, with examples of each. Then explain lean, reusable, and sustainable design, and why each matters to a small force.

Reflection (write a short paragraph): This lesson argues that the constraint of a small force's means, taken positively, drives better design: clarity, simplicity, reuse, and the sharp separation of what needs an instructor from what does not. Think about the courses of this very College, studied online and certified in person: how does that blend let a small, dispersed Army train people it could never gather full-time? Then imagine you had to design a course for this Army with only a handful of instructor-days available all year. What would you push online, what would you guard for those precious in-person days, and what would you cut or reuse to make it sustainable?

Summary

The Royal Kaharagian Army is small, young, dispersed, largely part-time, and modestly resourced, so a course designed as a large, well-funded force would design it cannot be delivered here. Deliverability is a design criterion from the start: a course that cannot be run, repeatedly, with the means the force has is not a good design, however excellent on paper.
The central technique is blended learning: combine asynchronous online self-study (scalable, cheap, flexible, consistent, ideal for the knowledge layer) with in-person instruction (scarce and costly, reserved for what only it can do). The College's model: study online, certified in person.
Push everything online that online can genuinely teach (the knowledge: understanding, principles, procedures, and preparing learners for in-person training), and reserve in-person time only for what truly requires it: physical skills, supervised practice and coaching, sign-off by a qualified person, and the lived team experience a screen cannot give.
Design lean (as little instructor time, money, equipment, and overhead as the objectives allow, for deliverability and sustainment, not cheapness for its own sake), design for reuse (shared, common components and a common template, so effort spent once serves many courses), and design for sustainability (a course a small staff can keep running and current over years and hand over), looking to cooperation where the force's own means fall short.
The reward is training that actually happens, year after year, producing real capability, which is worth far more than a brilliant design that never runs; and the constraint, taken positively, drives clarity, simplicity, and good design.
This is the knowledge layer; where exactly to draw the online/in-person line and how lean is lean enough are judgements built by designing and running real small-force courses under a qualified designer and signed off. This lesson applies the design of Lesson 03, the implementation of Lesson 07, and the objectives of Lesson 06 to the small-force context, and connects to the small-state capability and cooperation of PME 510.

Designing for a Small Force: Blended, Asynchronous, and Resource-Lean Training