Has SCUBA training gone too far?

[violamama]

With Distinctive Specialty, the only money PADI makes is the processing fee for sending out the C-card. If the student takes the class and decides a card is not needed, then PADI does not get a dime.
In summary, PADI gets little to nothing for most of these specialties (other than the ones for which they sell student texts), and by approving the specialties, they provide a level of safety to their instructors who teach the courses.

I had wondered that. My husband and I were trying to decide between just doing the shop's orientation to drysuits (comes free with purchase) or do the full cert. The official course has more diving, so we might spring for it. Having the card also means we can rent drysuits should the need arise.

The insurance thing makes total sense.

 

[kelemvor]

I think it's mostly just sales crap. The agencies could offer this training through instructors but there really shouldn't be a card or certification associated with them. If you want a boat class, take a boat class. There are a few that are somewhat useful. I my mind, Drysuit diving sticks out. I haven't tried it yet, but will be soon. The only reason this one sticks out in my mind is a recent accident involving a scubaboard moderator. That accident makes me think that a drysuit class is probably not superfluous. Nitrox.. I don't think a whole class is necessary.. Perhaps they could extend OW classes by 10 minutes and cover the necessary material. Okay, maybe it would really take 15 or 30 minutes to get it all in.

Now, there are still plenty of advanced classes that are worthy of cards. Cave diving, decompression/trimix. Maybe even wreck penetration.. not sure on that one since I've neither penetrated a wreck nor taken a class on it.

Of course instructor type stuff seems like a valid enough class and card.

Maybe it's just all the crap like "Photography, boat diving, nitrox as a whole class," as you first mentioned.


Some people like the classes. I have heard lots of people do class after class back to back so they can go diving. There's definitely something comforting about having an instructor right there when you're diving. Especially when you're new and unsure of everything. I think those people are the ones that the agencies feed off with all these unnecessary classes.

Did first drift dive on day 1. Day 2 as we headed toward the boat I was told by instructor I was leading the dive. Then met 5 strangers. I learned a lot on that dive. I had 3 swimmers from Chicago who wanted to swim to cuba, I had two honey mooners who drifted along 30 ft above the bottom holding hands and looking into each other eyes. Keeping this group in eyesite with 3 surging ahead and 2 falling back took constant vigilence while towing the float. Then I learned how drifting but being anxious can really up your SAC. Plus all had to be done in a low key manner so that the paying dive customers were happy and got a full dive in. Great experience.

Doing a drift dive is easy. Leading a real drift dive with strangers and actually trying to keep the group together can be challenging.

I would expect leading a group of people on any dive to be some kind of divemaster or instructor type function. Granted you've got WAY more experience diving that I do, but I've never had to lead a group. If I was asked to do so on a boat I paid to dive from I would probably say "not unless you're going to pay me". Actually doing a drift dive.. in my opinion it's the easiest way to dive. You don't have to worry about navigating, you drift and the boat follows your flag. On my last drift dive we had 8 divers (4 pairs) and we did not stay together in a close group. Each pair carried their own flag and the boat followed the flags. Staying together in a group of 8 would feel awful crowded in my opinion.

 

[boulderjohn]

I think it's mostly just sales crap.

I guess you must be one of the people I hear about who refuse any pay for the work they do. A lot of instructors prefer to be paid when they do their job. That may seem outrageously greedy of them, but that is how it is.

The agencies could offer this training through instructors but there really shouldn't be a card or certification associated with them.

As said above, you don't have to get the card if you don't want it. Almost all of the cost of the course goes to paying for the instruction. The agency gets little to nothing. By making it a sanctioned class, they provide a consistent curriculum and protection from liability.

Some people like the classes. I have heard lots of people do class after class back to back so they can go diving. There's definitely something comforting about having an instructor right there when you're diving. Especially when you're new and unsure of everything. I think those people are the ones that the agencies feed off with all these unnecessary classes.

So people like to take classes, and they enjoy working with instructors, but the agencies are wrong for providing them with what they want? Interesting point of view.

Actually doing a drift dive.. in my opinion it's the easiest way to dive. You don't have to worry about navigating, you drift and the boat follows your flag. On my last drift dive we had 8 divers (4 pairs) and we did not stay together in a close group. Each pair carried their own flag and the boat followed the flags. Staying together in a group of 8 would feel awful crowded in my opinion.

This illustrates part of the problem I see with your post. You really have very little experience with a lot of diving, and you have very little experience with drift diving in particular. You know how drift diving is done in one part of the world, and assume that is how it is everywhere. Do you realize that in lots of the top drift diving locations in the world, dive flags cannot be used? Why not check out the recent thread about the 7 people who were lost in Indonesia a few weeks ago while drift diving, with 2 of them dying? Any idea how many people have been lost and not even recovered while drift diving in Cozumel over the past couple of decades? Sure it's easy to drift dive in your area, but the whole world is not your area.

 

[Hawkwood]

I've taken the PADI Drift class. I learned a lot regarding the locale I learned in, one of the more interesting was estimating the current based in the way the fans and sponges moved. Having not been exposed to current prior to that, I found it helpful. It was taught well.

But as John says, stuff is different all over the place.

Yeah, drift diving in the St. Lawrence was one of the spookiest things I have done. I wasn't prepared for that.

Drifting along the Bow River was pleasant, but you have to know how to react fast to get into the eddies if you wanted out of the current.

Just because you think you know, or are happy and comfortable in some circumstances does not mean that knowledge will "translate".

Regarding the Zoombie diver? We found out last weekend that our Shop owner has been asked by the fellow who developed it to run the class here. We jumped all over it encouraging her to consider it. What a fun weekend for us, as well as the participants that will be. S&R, Rescue, a bit of EFR, Nav, it's all part of the "fun". So why not? Isn't diving for recreation supposed to be fun? Can't learning be fun too?

 

[scoobydrew]

I never understand why people get so offended by this subject.

Training agencies offer courses that make them money, let me simplify that, a business sells stuff in order to make profit. In todays society we are surrounded by consumerism anyone with the remotest grasp on business should understand that a company will endeavor to be profitable and if it fails then it ceases to exist.

So, does the business use immoral sales tactics or in some other way force the consumer to buy something that they do not want or need? In the case of specialties no they do not. The product is available and it is your choice if you buy it or not. When I go to a supermarket I see a ton of stuff that most of the time my brain will not even register because I already know it is something I perceive to be an unnecessary waste of money, does it make me angry? does it make me want to criticize the people who make and sell the stuff or even those who buy the stuff? no, not really, there are too many other things going on in my day that I would rather think about.

But are the specialties worthless? well some courses to some people will of course provide no benefit. Are all courses useless to everybody? of course not. The OP originally references courses that SSI offer. I am a PADI instructor but imagine that many of the specialties are along the same idea. You mention underwater photography, it takes more than owning a camera to be a good photographer. People who are interested in photography continue to work on their skills for years if not decades I don't think it would be a waste of time and money for someone to accelerate that learning by receiving training. Does it bother you when people offer land based photography training?

Navigation is something that divers often have room to improve on, why not do a course that is designed to improve the users ability in that subject while underwater?

The value of nitrox is a given.

And so on and so on

The point I'm trying to make is that the wide spectrum of SCUBA divers/customers have a vast range of wants and needs. Whether you deem a course relevant or not is only really applicable to your own wants and needs but the global diving society is bigger than just you and specialty courses may well fit with other peoples wants and needs. OK I'll admit that some courses do push the idea and offer training in things that I wander who would want to sign up for them but the other thing about this is some people like to own C cards, they are card collectors and what is wrong with that? I am not interested in collecting stamps or old coins but some people do and who am I to criticize them? The Zombie thing has been discussed at length before, a business making money in return providing fun and training.

We need to remember that the square root of recreational diving is people having fun underwater so if someones idea of fun is having a zombie adventure in a quarry (not really much else to see or do in there) and then get a card as a memento then have at it, go enjoy yourselves.

The agencies do their bit in providing structure, content and materials but it is down to the instructor to make the course a valid educational (and fun) experience for the participants. They should understand what motivated the student to enroll on the course in the first place and to then ensure that their needs are met within the standards of the agency they operate under, if that happens then as far as I can see no one has any grounds to be upset.

 

[Aguablanco1]

I don't see specialty courses as necessarily bad, just as not imparting enough skill. Knowledge reviews are a very good way to determine if the student has read and understands the material. This is a good first step. The remaining part of the education is getting hands on instruction in putting that knowledge to a practical use. There is a direct correlation between expectations and realizations. If the instructors expectations are that the student will demonstrate a certain level of proficiency the student will realize that there will have to be some commitment on their part to reach the necessary skill level. One suggestion might be that after taking a buoyancy class the student would have a defined time to work on those skills in an independent manner before returning to the instructor for some sort of final exam, or if necessary remedial instruction, before a card is issued. While more complicated than the current system, it would assure a certain skill level is reached before obtaining the card.
RichH

 

[boulderjohn]

I wrote about this concept in a recent forum, but I will repeat it here. In the world of education, there has been an evolution in the thinking of instructional content. A common descriptive term for the two kinds of learning being differentiated is "Just in Case" instruction vs. "Just in Time" instruction. "Just in Case" instruction piles information into a course that someone MIGHT need to know sometime in the future. Some of that is essential. In scuba, an example of good "just in case" instruction is the use of an alternate air source in case of an out of air emergency. The odds are that someone will never need that instruction, but in case they do, it comes up unawares, and the diver will need to know it when it happens.

In the case of less critical information, "just in time" instruction allows the learner to receive the instruction only when it is needed. A lot of divers will never do any underwater photography, so we don't clog their early training that information but rather let them seek out that training when they decide they need it. There is some dispute about what constitutes good topics for just in time instruction. For example, one frequent critic of the current diver education system frequently insists that all divers need to get detailed instruction on diving with tides and diving at altitude (more than what is already in the course) during open water training. Others point out that an overwhelming percentage of divers will never dive at altitude or in areas where tides make a difference, and neither event should sneak up upon them unawares, so it makes sense to wait until they need that information to teach it to them. Another frequent critic on ScubaBoard has argued that all OW students need to be taught how to tie a bowline with one hand while wearing a three fingered mitten, just in case they ever need to do that. Others argue that not many people will ever be in a situation where they might possibly need that skill, and when they realize such a dive is coming, that would be a good time to learn it.

When you look at the potential for scuba instruction today, the possibilities seem endless. There is far, far more that is possible to learn now than in the earliest days of instruction. Should we pack all of that into a mammoth and incredibly expensive open water course with so much extraneous information that students cannot retain the really important things they need to know, or should we teach them the essentials and then offer them a collection of additional courses from which they can pick and choose according to their needs?

 

[Lorenzoid]

I think fewer people would be bothered by "specialties" if: (1) they were called something else (I think "specialty" implies one becomes a specialist), and (2) the ones that have nothing to do with dive safety separated out from the ones that do, and (3) completing a course of the former type doesn't get you a card that looks suspiciously like a certification card. Outside of the scuba world, you can find all kinds of ridiculous courses offered, and nobody is bothered. The uneasiness I have with PADI's courses is that they co-mingle Fish ID, Underwater Photographer, etc., in the same list with Enriched Air and give the successful student the same sort of cards for everything.

 

[boulderjohn]

I got two new specialty cards in November--neither one from PADI, BTW. Both were from PSAI, the agency represented in this thread by Trace Malin, who posted above. I took both of them because I wanted the training. Cards came with both of them. In one case, I really didn't care whether I got the card or not. In the other, I very much needed the card.

The first was for sidemount diving in an overhead environment. I could have taken the open water sidemount diving course from the same instructor and learned much of the same stuff, but since I was planning to do most of my sidemount diving in an overhead environment, that's what I chose. I got very good instruction, and I got a card. The card is sitting in a box in a cupboard and will probably never see the light of day again, but who cares? The instruction was valuable, and I got what I paid for.

The other card, from the same instructor, was for operating a dive propulsion vehicle (scooter) in an overhead environment. The only difference between the card I received for that class and the card I received for the sidemount class is that I have already needed to show it. When I dived the Devil's Eye system in Florida last month, I had to show the card each day to be allowed to use my scooter in the cave.

Can someone tell me what is wrong with what I did in either of these cases?

 

[rhwestfall]

Yeah, drift diving in the St. Lawrence was one of the spookiest things I have done. I wasn't prepared for that.

come drift the Niagara with us.... I was amazed last summer when we drifted the St. Lawrence that you could stop, and swim up current..... WOW!!!!

Anyhow.... some of the "specialties" are necessary geographical skills. I hear of OW being taught in a DS in the PNW. Nitrox is some times thrown in with OW. Lines/Reels are not uncommon here in the Great Lakes when the vis is not good. Drift dives are one of the only dives you can do if you don't have a boat...

Sure, using them as an excuse to get in the water and do more diving (perhaps under conditions you haven't encountered yet) is never a bad thing, but it seems that there is too much of a pitch that you have to get the card to be a [real] diver.... phooey.

Skills and knowledge trump plastic...... badgse? we don't need no stinkin' badges.....