Smarter ways to gain skills, or as the DoD puts it: Leveraging the right learning model and embedded analytics for outstanding results in cyber operator training. With the increasing threat of cybercrime and national security issues, growing the number of qualified cybersecurity professionals has become a national imperative. Addressing this problem and specifically developed to enhance the efficacy and efficiency of cyber-operator development and education, the Cyber Operations Academy Course (COAC) is occured as a public-private partnership between City Colleges of Chicago and the Department of Defense (DoD). In two previous iterations, COAC learners with little if any cyber or college experience using an authentic problem-based approach incorporating cooperative and collaborative learning models produced very large positive effects (Cohen’s d=1.34) in pre/post assessments and group comparison. The key to achieving such compelling results is strongly believed to be the mix of an authentic problem strategy, learning “fire” teams, and fire team leaders highly experienced in both cyber operations and teaching. Understanding more deeply how students interact with each challenge and their use and discovery of external resources in solving them has been elusive. This presentation discusses the COAC learning model, the underlying technical platform (ESCALATE) and the incorporation of the Experience API (xAPI) facilitating robust learning analytics were used for summative assessment and continuous course improvement.With the increasing threat of cybercrime and national security issues, growing the number of qualified cybersecurity professionals has become a national imperative. Addressing this problem and specifically developed to enhance the efficacy and efficiency of cyber-operator development and education, the Cyber Operations Academy Course (COAC) is occured as a public-private partnership between City Colleges of Chicago and the Department of Defense (DoD). In two previous iterations, COAC learners with little if any cyber or college experience using an authentic problem-based approach incorporating cooperative and collaborative learning models produced very large positive effects (Cohen’s d=1.34) in pre/post assessments and group comparison. The key to achieving such compelling results is strongly believed to be the mix of an authentic problem strategy, learning “fire” teams, and fire team leaders highly experienced in both cyber operations and teaching. Understanding more deeply how students interact with each challenge and their use and discovery of external resources in solving them has been elusive. This presentation discusses the COAC learning model, the underlying technical platform (ESCALATE) and the incorporation of the Experience API (xAPI) facilitating robust learning analytics were used for summative assessment and continuous course improvement.