I'm not sure you will find an answer that you will be happy with. My open water class back in the 80's was 16 weeks long, 5 days a week (and that was a PADI Open Water Course), now days it just wouldn't fly. With Prescriptive Teaching being a norm for a lot of agencies now days, shorter and shorter classes are more common. Advancements in technology has played a crucial role in how people learn things. I believe that as an old school diver, it takes me a while to warm up to newer ways of doing things. But the reality of the matter is, the majority of newer divers, between age 10-40, online is the way to go. If you want to learn how to do something, you type it into the search bar on YouTube, and VOILA, you are an expert (Just like coming here to ScubaBoard and asking a question in a public forum). It took me a while to understand this, but once I realized that people in general are smarter than I give them credit for, then my teaching methods changed. As not only a dive instructor, but a Public Servant in my community, even the local community college where we do our con-ed training at, has went to all online training. If you are worried about your son not being able to learn this way, then ask his instructor for a more traditional classroom. That is the beauty of teaching scuba, instructors have the freedom to combine the online training with the face to face time, and make it as long as necessary, to make sure the student learns the material. Most instructors will accommodate you, if they don't, seek another instructor. I would first give your son some credit and just see how well he does with the online. If he doesn't feel comfortable, or you believe it needs to be more in depth than what he receives in training, then you are the parent, seek it else where. Lastly, for the pool work, I will admit that most agencies have dumb down their training, and a lot of old school divers like myself disagree with this. However, I also believe that we can learn way to much at the Open Water level if we are not careful. Thus, taking some skills out and putting them into other classes is not all that bad. Back when I learned, computers were very taboo, and considered unreliable, thus knowing how to calculate air consumption was much more important in the event of a computer failure. Though this still holds true today, computers are much more reliable than what they were, and even though the value of learning air consumption is still there, for most divers that only dive on vacation, in less than 40 feet of water, with time restrictions given to them by the charter, learning it in Open Water is not as valuable to some divers as it is to others. Once a diver makes the decision to continue their education by taking other specialties, then the value becomes even greater to them learning said calculations. Hope this somewhat answers your question. P.S., ask his instructor if you can sit in and audit his classroom, and then use that time to compare the way you learned, to the new age way of teaching, instead of what we tell you here on ScubaBoard. Happy Diving.
