wjknobles:
all i have to say on this is that online learning will never be a substitute for classroom teaching, especially for something like scuba. there are too many questions that students have the possibility of asking for any kind of online learning portion to cover. call me old-fashioned but teaching scuba isn't about the profit. the job of an instructor is not to teach as many students as possible, but to teach safe diving to as many students as are willing to learn it. as much as it pains me to say it, teaching scuba is not a path to wealth.
and though i am not a PADI instructor i do not have issues with the agency due to my certification agency. i just find it hard to fully trust a teaching agency that is run as a "for profit" agency. think of how our schools and universities would
be run if they were for profit.
I have always used PADI for my instruction in diving. I have completed OW, AOW, Rescue, Master Scuba Diver and a litany of specialties including Wreck, Deep, Night, Medic First Aid, National Geographic, Nitrox (40%), Equipment, Peak Performance Buoyancy, and Digital Underwater Photography. For every one of these courses, there was payment and submission to PADI for a c-card. All of these courses involved classroom time and water time, and usually testing at both.
Having been in the corporate world for 27 years and having seen the evolution and rise of the Internet, most large companies are using the Internet for all repetitive classroom training and testing now to cut expenses. Every year I am required to take a minimum of 3 online courses that must be completed by the end of the second quarter.
PADI, Put another dollar in, is no exception. They see this as another market that needs to be opened up, particularly since most 10 year olds are as comfortable with the Internet as they are with their mommies. In fact, where do prospective new divers come from anyway? The advertising focus is on younger and sooner, directly to the kids and around the parents, a disturbing trend in my opinion.
Now, that being said, I have been teaching project management courses for a dozen years. Recently the company has created modules to replace some of the face time that a student needs to have to save on travel expenses. In my opinion, training face-to-face is at the top of the food chain when it comes to effectiveness. There is no guarantee that a student has read all of the material presented in the online module unless every single item is tested and passed successfully. Is PADI going to make the written test 100 questions long now for OW? Aren't there some other liability issues with online testing like... is the person in the pool the same person that took the test online? Forget all the liability issues for PADI, the instructor and the LDS, what about the safety of the divers that will be cranked out in this process?
I am not an instructor... yet..., and I don't have a horse in this race, but from my past experience with on-line versus classroom training, there is no substitute for face time.
