I’ve only done the SDI/TDI eLearning, but I’ve found them to be good. Easy to navigate. I still have access to the OW and Nitrox course material I took 3 years ago.
Which agency has the best online materials?
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Aside from the limited cost/benefit of constantly updating materials to avoid looking “dated,” remember that if everything is produced to state-of-the-art tech standards you exclude a large portion of the world with more problematic internet access. Streaming video needs to be produced for a lowest common denominator. The book and DVD options will be around for a LONG time just to avoid shutting out parts of your customer base.
Addicted2H2O
Contributor
I've used TDI, IANTD, and PADI. TDI was phenomenal and padi was well padi. I wouldn't say it was anything groundbreaking, but it was well put together and worked smoothly. IANTD, on the other hand, was a throwback. What I was told would be e-learning was basically a digital textbook where I ended up just printing a pdf of the workbook to stop the pain.
mwerle
Contributor
I've recently been doing a couple of SDI/TDI/ERDI courses and the online learning is... ok.
The material itself is mostly pretty good, but there is no provision for offline study/review. Basically read a chapter (clicking through a page at a time instead of smoothly being able to read the entire chapter), then immediately do the exam. Not very good for retention. I've now taken to copy-pasting the material into an offline document for better reading and review prior to taking the exams.
It's also all static material, at least not in the courses I've done so far. Nothing interactive or audiovisual and there's plenty of material which could benefit from some interactivity especially once one gets into more complex tables. It would be trivial for this format to generate random practice problems for you to work through, for example.
The review exams are extremely mixed. Sometimes you get 10 questions on an extremely short "fluff" chapter, other times only 3 questions on a very long and very technical chapter. You have to get 100% to proceed and if you get anything wrong you have to re-read the _entire_ chapter. In some cases I completely disagreed with the "correct" answer, or the phrasing of the question/answers was extremely poor.
Better would be an in-depth review of the question(s) you failed, followed by redoing the exam with a new set of random questions, as well as the question(s) you failed.
The final exam randomly covers bits of everything and only requires an 80% pass mark.
Later, your instructor will cover any questions you missed as they have full access to your progress, which is when you hopefully get to discuss things in more detail.
I'd give it at most 6 / 10 compared to other online (non-SCUBA) training I've done. But I have no experience with other SCUBA agencies' online training so in comparison to those it might be very good.
The material itself is mostly pretty good, but there is no provision for offline study/review. Basically read a chapter (clicking through a page at a time instead of smoothly being able to read the entire chapter), then immediately do the exam. Not very good for retention. I've now taken to copy-pasting the material into an offline document for better reading and review prior to taking the exams.
It's also all static material, at least not in the courses I've done so far. Nothing interactive or audiovisual and there's plenty of material which could benefit from some interactivity especially once one gets into more complex tables. It would be trivial for this format to generate random practice problems for you to work through, for example.
The review exams are extremely mixed. Sometimes you get 10 questions on an extremely short "fluff" chapter, other times only 3 questions on a very long and very technical chapter. You have to get 100% to proceed and if you get anything wrong you have to re-read the _entire_ chapter. In some cases I completely disagreed with the "correct" answer, or the phrasing of the question/answers was extremely poor.
Better would be an in-depth review of the question(s) you failed, followed by redoing the exam with a new set of random questions, as well as the question(s) you failed.
The final exam randomly covers bits of everything and only requires an 80% pass mark.
Later, your instructor will cover any questions you missed as they have full access to your progress, which is when you hopefully get to discuss things in more detail.
I'd give it at most 6 / 10 compared to other online (non-SCUBA) training I've done. But I have no experience with other SCUBA agencies' online training so in comparison to those it might be very good.
I've done PADI nitrox, dive theory, and divemaster online. I also did EFR online. I also spent some time looking through the open water online materials and had a couple students opt for that method.
I found the materials hit and miss. Dive theory was outstanding. The pedagogy was well considered and everything worked. The others weren't horrible, but were glitchy. E.g, one of my students couldn't get a quiz to work on his phone using the app, though it was fine when he did it through a browser on his phone.
I found the materials hit and miss. Dive theory was outstanding. The pedagogy was well considered and everything worked. The others weren't horrible, but were glitchy. E.g, one of my students couldn't get a quiz to work on his phone using the app, though it was fine when he did it through a browser on his phone.
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