I guess the use of milk in a yeast dough has many differences of opinions.
To my understanding, the whey in milk decreases the rise in a bread dough. Powdered milk actually has more whey then whole milk. It is commonly used to make cheeses due to that fact. Scalding milk and even even adding powdered milk to a fluid in a bread dough recipe and heating it up to 180* for a few minutes has been reccomended.
Recently Americas Test Kitchen did a show on the science behind this madness. I thought I could get the video on this but may have to don a bit more searching to do so.

In my honest opinion, powdered milk was put into recipes in the past because of not having regular whole milk as easily on hand as today.

may do not want to use milk in bread recipes because they feel the bread spoils faster as well

Ingredients
1 1/8 cups water
1 1/2 tablespoons oil
3 cups whole wheat flour
3 tablespoons nonfat dry milk powder
3 tablespoons sunflower seeds
3 tablespoons sesame seeds
1 1/2 tablespoons flax seeds
1 1/2 teaspoons sugar
1/2 teaspoon salt
3 teaspoons active dry yeast
Instructions
1.Place all ingredients in your bread machine's full assembled pan in the order specified by your machine's manufacturer.

2.Select the wheat/grain/basic or white cycle and press start.

It does seem by the recipe that the powdered milk was used instead of milk as a liquid. The amount of powder would probably equal 1 1/8 cups of milk or low fat milk.. Zap the milk in the microwave for about 2 minutes and then let it cool for about 5 minutes.
Odd thing about your recipe is the use of 3 cups of whole wheat flour. I usually only use 1 cup of whole wheat to 2 cups of unbleach all purpose flour when I make whole wheat bread. The same goes for rye flour or Semolina. Even when making corn bread I use a cornmeal and flour combination.
If there isn't a salt issue I would also increase that to at least 1 1/2 tsp.
With the straight whole wheat and the 3 different seeds, this bread should be a real colin cleaner, lol. A lot of fiber going on there.

In the next few days, I will make both the original recipe (without powdered milk), and a loaf with only one cup of wheat flour and post the results. Thanks for some very good and apparently learned advice. Ya'll probably have more knowlege than I'll ever aquire