BUCKLEY AIR FORCE BASE, Colo. -- A training for newly appointed Unit Reserve Coordinators is now available 24/7 via the Advanced Distributed Learning System.
The course, which was released July 26, takes about one hour to complete, is mandatory for all URCs and provides the tools needed to educate commanders on matters related to the Individual Reserve, said Master Sgt. Andrew Sandoval, the member of the Headquarters Individual Reservist Readiness and Integration Organization’s Integration Cell team who developed the new training.
URCs are active-duty Airmen appointed by their commanders to serve as a liaison between the Individual Reservist, the HQ RIO detachment and the active-duty unit. It is an additional-duty assignment and there are approximately 1,400 URCs across the Air Force.
Additionally, the training provides URCs with the knowledge they need to manage the Individual Mobilization Augmentees assigned to their units.
IMAs are accountable to the Air Force Reserve Command but are assigned to active-component organizations. Their primary role is to provide backfill support for their units when needed but they can also volunteer their service to support exercises, contingencies, deployments and other needs throughout the Air Force and Department of Defense. They are managed by HQ RIO, its seven detachments and eight operating locations.
Initial URC Training was previously offered on a monthly basis in a live, online format. However, this required too many man-hours for the return on investment HQ RIO was getting, since many URCs could not make the scheduled classes, said Sandoval.
The development of the on-demand course began in September 2015 when the HQ RIO Integration Cell identified the low attendance, only a handful of URCs each month. That is when Sandoval approached the ADLS team and began the process for submitting a new course.
After a thorough curriculum vetting process that took him into January 2016, he began compiling the course in Adobe Captivate, the software required by the ADLS learning management system.
Unfortunately, when Sandoval finished developing the course, he discovered the version of the software he was using could not create a file readable by the ADLS servers.
After talking with the ADLS and Adobe Help Desk teams, it was discovered that newer versions of the software were not backwards compatible with earlier versions of the software.
Sandoval said that Adobe agreed to help and their engineers made the changes to Captivate that would allow him to move forward with the deployment of his training.
His efforts to get the URC training loaded into ADLS may also inadvertently help others across the Air Force. Sandoval said that during the course of troubleshooting the software issue, he discovered that other organizations had run into the same problems he did. With the software updates, those organizations should be able to publish their trainings, he said.
To access the training, follow the steps in this guide.