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NKO Approaches 650,000 User Mark

Navy NewsStand

Story Number: NNS060623-19
Release Date: 6/24/2006 10:00:00 AM

By Ed Barker, Naval Education and Training Command Public Affairs

PENSACOLA, Fla. (NNS) -- With more than 600,000 personnel using Navy Knowledge Online (NKO) on a daily basis, NKO continues to expand in both content and users while serving as the Navy’s Sea Warrior Web portal for education and training management and life-long learning.

In June, NKO will register 650,000 users, with nearly 96 percent of active-duty personnel and 95 percent of the Reserve force now enrolled.

“We know NKO will continue to grow,” said Peg David, NKO program manager for the Naval Education and Training Command. “It was only last September that we registered a half million users and set a major milestone for NKO. Now we’ve added an additional 150,000. The increased number of users is nice, but the milestone we continue to focus on is ensuring that users have a quality experience and can readily access the content, training courses and other applications that make up NKO.”

NKO has seen dramatic increases in usage over the last year. In June 2005, average daily logins numbered just more than 15,000 Navywide. As of August 2005, that figure had risen to nearly 22,000; in May 2006 that figure is nearly 33,000. More than 2,000 new users are logging in each week. To date, more than 115 million downloads have been logged through NKO, such as Navy E-Learning, Career Management System (CMS), 5-Vector Model (5VM) and others.”

As the knowledge portal for the Sea Warrior part of the Chief of Naval Operations’ (CNO) Sea Power 21 initiative, NKO continues to adapt to advances in technology.

In June 2005, the portal went through a significant redesign to improve overall user-friendliness. The new layout focuses on content relevant to the individual based upon the user’s status (active duty, Reserve, civilian, rank, rate, etc.). Improvements include a new global navigation structure that supports all users, improved site nomenclature, content and layout improvements for information, and community specific home pages.

In April 2006, NKO added two new management tools that allow users to collaborate in an encrypted environment in real time with other service users around the world. The tools, Inter-Domain Messaging and Presence Management, open new doors for communicating with users of Army and Air Force knowledge portals, as well. The Army and Air Force initiated the new tools in January, and the Navy added the capability to NKO April 7.

Using Presence Management, NKO users can identify which users are online at any given time around the world. This provides them the opportunity to reach out and communicate with peers, mentors and subject matter experts, and collaborate on education and training initiatives or share support information. Users will be able to use the Instant Messaging (IM) tool to further these working relationships and build their own personal networking community.

“We are constantly working on better functionality for NKO,” David added. “New features, like a vastly improved search tool, will be available soon. But we haven’t forgotten that our main challenge is to ensure that accessibility and connectivity is available in the portal for all Department of the Navy users, whether serving ashore, overseas, in remote locations or afloat.”

“NKO at sea is making progress, but we realize with OPTEMPO (operations tempo) requirements, platform availability and bandwidth restrictions there is quite a challenge ahead of us,” said David. “As we continue to deploy NKO spirals throughout the fleet, our goal for the future is for Sailors serving at sea to have nearly the same access to content and information that Sailors serving ashore have through NKO.”

Two functions that remain most popular for Sailors are Electronic Training Jacket (ETJ) access and Navy E-Learning courses. Navy E-Learning hosts more than 4,000 courses ranging from information technology to soft skills (including leadership skills), to Navy-developed courses. As more courses come online, Sailors in both resident schoolhouses and around the globe will be able to use NKO to take distance-learning courses, whenever it is convenient and necessary.

For more information on Navy Knowledge Online, visit the NKO Web site at https://www.nko.navy.mil. For more information on the Naval Education and Training Command, visit https://www.cnet.navy.mil.

For related news, visit the Naval Education and Training Command Navy NewsStand page at www.news.navy.mil/local/cnet/.