I have been trying to find the outline for the courses online somewhere so I could maximize my $$.
From what I recall of most of the specialties I took (books currently in storage) once they're out I'll do separate ones for the ones I did (Deep, Wreck, Dry, Nav, Night, Nitrox) if you want. An outline of most courses would be:
Ch. 1: Intro (Mostly fluff usually repetitive of SSI philosophy with a little bit new on the end and how the type of diving involved with this specialty adds both new excitement and new dangers to diving)
Ch. 2: Equipment (some talk of different equipment that might be involved in the type of specialty, strangely usually its just talk of lights and reels, often out of date.)
Ch. 3: Basic Techniques
Ch. 4 "Advanced" Techniques, )usually these two could be combined, between them there's about five useful tips on most things.)
Ch. 5 More fluff usually telling you what not to do until you have more experience without much guidance on how to get it.
The only one that I can think deviates from this pattern significantly is Wreck diving course, which would better be entitled "Wreck finding" which spent a lot of time talking about researching and locating wrecks. If you have a boat and a regular buddy who will go looking for wrecks with you its great. If you just want to go do some diving on charters or with people that know where stuff is already, its not so. There's also a chapter about NOT penetrating wrecks.
That all said I think the best part of the classes is trying things out in the water and getting some feedback on your technique/trying new and potentially dangerous things with lots of supervision (If you have someone knowledgable and experienced as well as patient and trustworthy enough to do that for you without charging you for it do it, if you did I would assume you wouldn't be starting a thread about classes though). A lot of people will complain (and indeed already have in the thread) about specialties 'just being cards" and looking solely at the classroom side there is a lot of fluff and repitition and that may be true. But I had a great instructor that gave me a lot of feedback and answered questions and went far and beyond the basic outline of the class, basically any time I did a dive with him, even a pleasure dive with our club he was having me review some part of one of my classes or adding onto it, wasn't just hop in the water twice here's your card. For nav I did about 15 dives before he would pass me (not just because I was bad at it), had to take us out in a very mucky lake, get very lost, and find the way back using a combination of natural and compass also had to navigate in a few different sites not just the same quarry we did every week.
Instead of looking at the class outline I'd focus more on the instructor. One good way to tell would be to ask about "Drift" or "Boat" diving specialties and see what they say, if it's not, I can't charge you for those in good conciense try somewhere else.
Aren't you glad you asked for people NOT to give their opinion on nitrox.
