By ROBERT A. HAMILTON, Special Correspondent

When Chief Sonar Technician (STC) Everett Clark reported for his apprenticeship training at the Naval Submarine School in Groton, Conn., he sat in a classroom and listened to an instructor who sketched basic concepts on a chalkboard. Down the hall, his future shipmates in the Fire Control (FT) and Electronics Technicians (ET) ratings were learning their specialties the same way.

A lot has changed since then. Clark now supervises a classroom full of trainees from each of the ratings in a single pipeline that is getting highly trained sailors to the waterfront quicker. Also, the Navy’s early assessments show the sailors are retaining more of what they learn.

In two years of review and change, the Navy has merged the 32-week electronics school, the 22-week sonar school and the 20-week fire-control school into a single 18-week class known as Submarine Electronics Computer Field or (SECF). It covers basic maintenance, underway steaming, tracking contacts and basic piloting.

Each class of students starts out in the same classroom learning common tasks. For instance, all three specialties have to be able to take voltage measurements across a circuit board and then repair the board once they establish what is wrong with it, said Chief Sonar Technician Steven Craddock. And they all need to know basic safety, such as how to ground a circuit while it’s being repaired.

The classes then branch out into specialized training midway through the course — each rate, for instance, will learn the specific cabinets where “their” circuit boards are located — and they come together at the end of the course to train as a single group.

“This gets the team working as if they were working on a boat,” said Charles “Chip” Dye, vice president of training systems for Sonalysts Inc., the Submarine School’s partner in developing the new course. “When a kid reports to the ship, [he’s] not qualified, but he knows a lot more than he would have a year ago.”

And it’s not just the students, said Electronics Technician Master Chief Patrick Agnew, SECF’s division officer. As the 44 petty officers and chiefs leading the classes collaborate, they are cross-pollinating as well.

“They’re getting well-versed in each others’ rates now,” he said. “The ET has a much greater understanding of the FT and ST job than he had when this started.”

Agnew said 15 students from the first class to graduate in July were brought back to the school in the fall for feedback on what parts of the course were most valuable to them, and which parts might need improvement. But even before that, he said, the course was being scrutinized and tweaked constantly.

“The biggest change is in the test, which was 100-percent essay questions when we started,” he said.

Multiple choice questions have now become standard, because so many of the students were unfamiliar with essay questions. “Most of these guys never saw an essay-type test until they got here. It wasn’t that they didn’t know the material, they just didn’t know how to answer an essay test,” Agnew said.

SECF has required everyone to get past some cultural barriers — if you’re an FT, you can’t just teach “your” rate anymore — but Clark said the submarine force is just starting to realize the potential of the new process.

“Eventually, the product we’re going to put out to the fleet is going to surpass anything we’ve seen before,” he said. “We’re at the point now, if you can’t deal with change, you’re going to get run over.”

SECF has become a model for the Navy’s Revolution in Training, which is supposed to employ technology to yield better-prepared sailors in less time.

“In my mind, this project is the first step in where we wanted to be in electronic training in the submarine force, and even wider, in the whole Navy,” said Capt. Arnold O. Lotring, commander of the Submarine Learning Center, which oversees all submarine training.

The course is highly modular, teaching 190 different topics, with 96 delivered electronically. Students work at their own pace, and can come in during non-class hours if they fall behind.

“It allows the kids who need more help to take more time with a topic, and it doesn’t affect the progress of the rest of the group,” Dye said.

Students also can upload their notes to their own home page on the Internet, which will allow them to access notes from their ship via a laptop or Personal Data Assistant. “The beauty of this is the information follows them throughout their careers, and they can access it anytime, anywhere,” Craddock said.

Just over 60 of the topics are taught in practicum settings and about 30 in seminar settings.

“What’s exciting about this kind of curriculum is that because it’s so modular it can be constantly in revision as we find better ways to improve the material,” Lotring said. “We’ve added a periscope into one of the laboratories to give them hands-on periscope training.”

But the online and simulator training have not reduced the need for instructors.

“In no way are we removing the military role model or the instructor from the picture,” said Dye. “What we’re doing is giving [instructors] the opportunity to supervise and evaluate the training, and making sure [sailors are] using their time to maximum effectiveness.”

In fact, Dr. Leslie A. Lucas, a senior instructional designer at Sonalysts, said instructors were key to developing the “storyboards” that laid out the flow of the course, as well as the Learning Center Content Style Guide, which provides guidance on developing both online and instructor-led curricula.

“The instructors played an important role in the development of the content,” Lucas said. “This was not a solution forced on them.”

Lotring said one advantage of the merged courses is that in the past it could be several months between the time someone applied for training and the time they got into a course. With 18 SECF courses per year, a new one starts on average every few weeks, typically with 12 STs, five ETs and five FTs. However, it is easy to adjust the mix quickly if the fleet is short of a particular rate.

“This new regimen gives everyone real flexibility, which means we have a lot fewer students sitting around waiting to class up,” Lotring said.

Reservists working at the Submarine School are also excited about the possibilities for their members, said Capt. John Chiffer of the Submarine Learning Center.

“We need to have an integrated learning environment where we, as part-time sailors, have access to the content, the multimedia instruction, from anywhere in the world,” he said. “This is going to allow a reserve sailor in Kansas or Oklahoma to access the same material that a student sitting in Groton is using.”

Because so much of the course is electronic, it’s been easy to adapt it to the Navy Knowledge On-Line system that tracks a sailor’s progress through the training process. That means a sailor can log on at any time to get a sense of which courses would advance a particular career path, and that sailor’s supervisor can find out which courses he or she has taken before the sailor gets to the ship.

The Submarine Learning Center already is working on the next stage of the process, using many of the techniques to deliver just-in-time intermediate-level training to petty officers in the fleet, said FTC Ronald Bergeron, fire control career manager and SECF project leader.

For instance, instead of returning to Groton for an 18-week course, a sailor might take a series of one-week online courses at their homeport. And the Navy is looking for commonalities that can be exploited in other communities — more than 40 percent of the training is considered exportable to surface or aviation rates.

“The Fleet ASW Training Center in San Diego has already said [it] will use some of the content in its course for surface sonarmen,” Lotring said. “We need to do this, not only for the sake of standardization, but because of the savings it will bring to the Navy.”

“One of the things we’re trying to push is ‘hey, this content is here, it’s available, you can use it, just come and get it,’” Craddock said. “People across the Navy, all communities, have really accepted this. They’ve seen it, they like it, they want to use the model that we’ve laid down.”