MAXWELL AIR FORCE BASE, Ala. -- Airmen now have at their fingertips the opportunity to receive credit for learning about another country’s culture while simultaneously responding to the chief of staff of the Air Force’s action order to understand the nation’s strategic competitors.
This can be achieved by accessing the latest version of the Air Force Culture and Language Center’s Air Force Culture Guide app.
The director of the AFCLC, Howard Ward, unveiled version 2.0 of the app to a virtual audience on Oct. 15, 2021, the last day of the 2021 Virtual Air University Language, Regional Expertise and Culture Symposium.
Ward described the heavily updated app as a one-stop shop for “accessible, relevant, impactful curriculum” in addition to culture field guides.
“It’s a delivery method that can deploy curriculum at enterprise scale, untethered from the constraints of government systems, which is especially great for total force Airmen, and it’s designed to accelerate learning for strategic competition by putting AFCLC’s ‘Global Classroom’ right in your pocket,” he said.
Shortly after its initial release in 2017, The Wall Street Journal recognized the original version as one of the six indispensable apps for business travelers.
The changes to the original app include:
- Enhanced accessibility to AFCLC’s Expeditionary Culture Field Guides – Users no longer need to download one of the 69 guides to view their content. Touch the block containing the name of the guide for it to open. Plus, there are seven new ECFGs on the way.
- Accelerated learning for strategic competition – Touch the Courses button at the bottom of the screen to view the first new course. Developing Cultural Competence is designed to baseline the user on what culture is, why it matters and how users can learn more as their career progresses. Two more courses will be released soon. These courses will allow each service member to achieve Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Charles Q. Brown Jr.’s Action Order Charlie individually by learning the fundamentals of culture for adversary understanding. Upon completing these courses, users will receive a certificate ready to upload to their learning record, as applicable.
- A video library will be coming soon to further enhance learning capabilities on the go.
The app is available through the App Store and Google Play, and it’s safe for Department of Defense mobile devices. More than 20,000 individuals are already utilizing the app, and for those individuals, an automatic update to Version 2.0 is now available.