The Basic School Period of Instruction

The Basic School has gone electronic! All our publications ("pubs") will be available online. This short post contains some information about that, including a link to the documents for your own curiosity. And I've obtained a tentative schedule for the POI.

POI

[Paragraph updated 20120614] "POI" can stand for a couple things. A "Period of Instruction" is a classroom session. The "Program of Instruction" is the set of subjects, lessons, exercises, skills, and so forth that students must master. "POI" may also be used to refer to the student handouts—the actual papers/documents used in completion of the Program of Instruction. Nobody actually says the whole thing, of course. We just say "POI" and it refers to whatever we need it to.

Blackboard

While we did receive some of our pubs in hard copy, TBS is going high-tech by utilizing a service called Blackboard¹ to make all the student handouts available electronically. This saves a LOT paper (literally, thousands of pages per Marine), and in the long run, it saves taxpayer money and provides an improved, modern learning experience for the next generation of Marine officers.

Pubs on iPad

There are several ways to do this, but here's the way I'm doing it right now.² I'm downloading all the pubs to my laptop and placing them into a folder that is synced with Cubby, a new service (currently in beta) somewhat similar to Dropbox. This allows me to carry around all the documents on my iPhone and my iPad, available for viewing even when I don't have an Internet connection on those devices. The next thing I need to figure out is how to be able to annotate/highlight them on the iOS devices. This will require the use of some other app, and may even require a switch back to Dropbox.

[Paragraph updated 20120624] The pubs are already available at various places around the Net. If you want to check mine out, click here. At the time of this posting, I only have the pubs for Zero Week done. Check back later as I add more. I have removed the link in the interest of operational security. While not classified information, it is best kept out of the public realm.

Lectures

Honorable mention to the fact that I'm going to try to record the audio from all the lectures from here on out. We'll see if I can get them to turn out okay; if they sound good, I may add them to the folder above.

Calendar

We have been given a copy of the tentative master schedule for the Delta Company 412 POI. This is helpful for us, of course, as we look ahead and prepare for upcoming tasks. Unfortunately, I cannot share that publicly due to operational security concerns which could put my tenure in the Marine Corps in jeopardy. Watch for updates from my parents, however, who may post from time to time with news and prayer requests based on what amount of information can be shared.


1. Blackboard recently purchased its competitor ANGEL, which was the service I used at my alma mater, Rose-Hulman. A couple guys I worked with at Rose's Helpdesk went on to work for ANGEL and subsequently Blackboard, including developing the iOS app, which is pretty neat. ↩

2. This would be a lot easier if TBS were to take advantage of the Blackboard feature which enables almost this exact functionality in the iOS app. Blackboard supports it, but our end does not take advantage of it. Maybe someday. ↩