NEWPORT, R.I. (NNS) – The Navy Supply Corps School (NSCS) and Center for Service Support (CSS) announced it would be revamping its Basic Qualification Course for Navy Reservists (BQC-NR) Dec. 6.
The BQC-NR is a comprehensive course of instruction which provides reserve component Direct Commissioning Program (DCP) officers and Supply Corps Limited Duty (LDO) and Chief Warrant Officers (CWO) with the fundamental, technical and managerial knowledge necessary to function effectively as Supply Corps officers within the Navy Reserve. The course is a combination of on-site training and self-paced correspondence work spanning 15 months. The BQC-NR curriculum encompasses supply management (SM), food service (FS), disbursing management (DM), retail operations (RO), and leadership and management (LM).
The BQC-NR course has a significant distance learning (DL) component; and was one of nearly a dozen courses chosen by Naval Education and Training Command (NETC) to use the Sakai Collaborative Learning Environment (CLE).
“The Sakai CLE provides an excellent alternative to the current method of student/instructor interaction currently employed during DL phases (email exchanges, course material provided on disk),” said David Ledoux, CSS curriculum instructional specialist. “The Sakai CLE would allow easy access to the instructor and other students in chat rooms. It also provides the instructor with numerous tools to track student participation and progress. Currently, NETC has an agreement with the Naval Postgraduate School (NPS) to utilize the Sakai platform hosted on their site.”
According to Ledoux, the main purpose of changing the course was to align the training of the students taking BQC-NR with the training received during the active duty basic qualification class (BQC).
“We also made changes by adding retail operations (RO) and disbursing management (DM) topics for our students,” said Ledoux. “The end result is a course lengthened from 12 to 15 months; additional DM and RO topics (as in the active duty BQC course) in Phase II residence training; increased DL period from five to eight months (adding one RO and one DM exam) and increased Phase III residence training by one week.”
According to Lt. Cmdr. Onofrio Margioni, director of NSCS Reserve Programs, the new training will
benefit the student /instructor relationship the most.
“The instructors will communicate with their students in real time, host study groups and live study sessions,” said Margioni. “They can also post grades and links to study material for upcoming test and quizzes.”
“The significance of this course is huge,” said Margioni. “Our students will retain their account access which will enable them [students] to access lessons learned from previous food service inspections along with links to the newest publications and directives.”
Margioni also said that the DLE curriculum is self-paced and will avoid the duplicity that exists when instructors review the same course material over a period of several months with individual students.
“We will optimize our instructional interface and infuse a level of real time discussion between our instructors and students,” said Margioni. “Our students will be more inclined to log-in to their account when the instructor is hosting a study group.”
The proposed date of Sakai CLE implementation into the BQC-NR is February 2014.
CSS and its learning sites provide sailors with the knowledge and skills needed to support the fleet's warfighting mission. More than 300 staff and faculty work hand-in-hand with the fleet and are dedicated to ensure training is current and well executed on behalf of 10,000 sailors who graduate from CSS courses annually in the administration, logistics and media communities.