33 replies to this topic

[JimG]

I envy you that freedom (I presume that's under YMCA?).

Yes, it's through YMCA - one of the better Nitrox courses (and texts) that I have seen. The course is recommended minimum six hours of instruction, and includes a lot of stuff on dive planning, air consumption, etc. There is a significant overlap with some of the traditional topics that are taught in AOW, which is why it made sense to me to combine the lecture portions of the two courses. I added an optional pool session (which I am allowed to do under standards) where I plan to have the students work on buoyancy control, weighting, and some advanced (but not necessarily AOW) skills - SMB deployment, alternative propulsion techniques, etc. I also plan to incorporate some rescue skills (air sharing, unconscious and/or toxing diver rescues, etc). This serves as a review for students who are already YMCA certified, and introduces these concepts to those who are not.

The enrollments will be kept relatively small to insure a more student-focused experience. I also intend to use U/W video during pool sessions to help students learn their skills better. This is something I started doing in my OW course this past year, and I have been very pleased with the results so far.

The actual AOW part (which is "mostly diving") is somewhat decoupled, in the sense that someone who already had AOW from another agency could take this course and still get something out of it. If they do go on and complete the diving portion for the YMCA AOW course, then they get their 5 AOW "skill" dives, plus two Nitrox dives (7 dives altogether, just like what I do for OW). So a person completing the entire two-course sequence winds up with the equivalent knowledge of OW, AOW, Nitrox, and PPB, and has about 15 logged dives to boot. About half of those dives are indirectly supervised, so the students get some experience planning and executing their own dives as well.

So the course serves several purposes - it acts as a sort of "bridge" course for people coming into our curriculum from other agencies, and also provides a comprehensive introduction to mixed gas diving in general, and Nitrox diving in particular. I spent quite a bit of time thinking about how to organize it - it's still very much a "work in progress" so we will see how it goes.

Given the opportunity I would actually prefer your approach. The sort of thing you could do in a dive club environment, which is one reason I'm considering reviving my BSAC membership/instructorship and forming my dive center into a BSAC club.

I don't know if it will work yet, so I guess you better hold off before deciding that my approach is better. I do prefer the BSAC/club-based model of "mentoring" divers, but it remains to be seen if that approach is financially viable.

-JimG

[peterbj7]

Very interesting post. Your mention of SMB reminds me that i have always thought SMB deployment should be part of every OW course. Sadly it's virtually never included.

How do YMCA standards compare with BSAC's? And are they available on the web?

The traditional BSAC system was woefully uncommercial and as soon as the PADI style of dive course appeared in the UK people moved to it in droves. But I think that had less to do with the technical standards followed being too tough and demanding than with the arbitrary and oppressive quasi-military atmosphere in those days in every BSAC branch. It has supposedly improved, and when I'm next in the UK I may do an instructor crossover course to BSAC.

[scubafanatic]

Its pretty accepted that using Nitrox is Safe, matter of fact alot of Dive-Ops are requiring Nitrox only on there boats because of safety and liability issues. So when a OW diver wants to go Advanced I think the Nitrox course should be taught in the AOW training. This could save the diver some money that could be spent on a dive trip or some new equipment. This might not help the divers that have already shelled out the bucks for Nitrox training, but could give a new to diving person alittle money to keep in there own pockets (kinda like a tax refund).

Your Thoughts

Bubski

...well, I suspect that if a Nitrox cert were folded into an AOW cert, the AOW cert price would be increased....somehow I can't see the dive industry implementing any 'freebies'.

[JimG]

Very interesting post. Your mention of SMB reminds me that i have always thought SMB deployment should be part of every OW course. Sadly it's virtually never included.

SMB deployment seems to be a "mostly European" skill. I don't know of any US-based agencies that routinely teach it, except GUE. It's not part of YMCA standards, but I think it is a great skill for working on buoyancy, trim, and teamwork.

How do YMCA standards compare with BSAC's? And are they available on the web?

I'm not familiar with BSAC S&Ps, so I don't really know how they compare. Unfortunately, the YMCA S&Ps are not available on the web. I only know of one agency that publishes their S&Ps publicly on the web (GUE). I wish more agencies would follow their example.

-JimG

[JimG]

I suspect that if a Nitrox cert were folded into an AOW cert, the AOW cert price would be increased....somehow I can't see the dive industry implementing any 'freebies'.

Yes it would, but it shouldn't cost any more than the total cost of taking the two courses separately. In fact, it might work out to be cheaper overall to do it this way, since you could combine the dives into one certification trip.

-JimG

[Walter]

On PADI rules - whatever happened to their suggestion that the final dive of the OW course could be on nitrox and count as the first of the two mandatory dives for the Nitrox course?

Depending on the OW course and how it was taught, it might not be too much of a leap to add a Nitrox dive or two in conjunction with the OW training. I do it fairly regularly, by offering a couple of Nitrox dives as "add on" experience dives, after the 4 OW dives are completed. Of course, my OW certification trip is a minimum of 7 dives, so that is not hard to do. Also, my OW class is about half a Nitrox class anyway, with discussion on Gas Laws, O2 tox, etc. My agency requires me to teach that material in the OW course, so I see no reason not to take advantage of the "captive" audience (and possibly generate interest in a follow-on course, i.e. "free marketing")

I wouldn't teach an OW course on nitrox, not one in the style of PADI courses anyway, as I think there's too much to take in all at once. But I do teach it, not as part of the AOW course but in parallel with it.

I have changed my thinking on this issue considerably in the last couple of years. About a year ago, I got curious and pulled some data on AOW and Nitrox certifications that I have issued in the last 10 years. What I found was that about 70% of the people who took one of the courses, took the other one within just a few months. I believe that was probably due to my policy of encouraging people to do Nitrox experience dives on their AOW certs and/or combine their Nitrox certification dives with an AOW certification. So starting this year, I am offering the certs in a combined format, with a pool session on buoyancy (similar to PADI's PPB, except taught with a DIR "spin").

My "thinking outside the box" approach on this has led me to believe that dive training needs to be "decompartmentalized". I believe that a smaller number of "quality" courses will serve divers better than the a'la carte approach that we have now (i.e. start with OW and then fill in the gaps with smaller "bites" from a bunch of shorter Specialty courses). My view on OW vs AOW vs Nitrox is that we really only need two courses, with the following learning outcomes:

• An entry-level (i.e. OW) course that teaches basic safety information about diving, and prepares divers to dive safely at depths to 60 feet, utilizing breathing gas that is appropriate to that depth range (i.e. air)
• A second-level course that drills down on buoyancy, propulsion, dive/gas planning (including air consumption calcs), and prepares divers to dive safely at depths to 100 feet, utilizing breathing gas that is appropriate to that depth range (i.e. Nitrox)

So that is how I have started structuring my courses. Of course I do not teach for a dive shop, so I have a little more freedom and flexibility to teach my courses the way I see fit. Not every instructor necessarily has that luxury.

I'll let you all know how it works out.

-JimG

Good for you! That's the way all entry level classes classes should be taught. Why do you even bother teaching AOW? With your OW class, it's a total waste. Why don't you teach Silver Advanced exclusively?

[JimG]

Why do you even bother teaching AOW? With your OW class, it's a total waste. Why don't you teach Silver Advanced exclusively?

Primarily due to market pressure - there is much more demand for AOW, and up until last year, I was willing to "package" it as part of a trip (i.e. take the trip, do the dives, get AOW for FREE - kind of my way of encouraging people to continue their training). However, I had something happen last year that caused me to change my thinking on that approach (story is below - note that this response is going to be somewhat long-winded, so I hope it's worth the read)

For my entry level course, I basically teach OW2 right out of the gate (standard OW course and dives plus a couple of experience dives tacked on the tail end). I've actually been doing my entry level course that way since I started teaching YSCUBA in 1994. Up until this past year, I always taught AOW and Nitrox as separate specialties, with AOW being a "mostly diving" course (usually taught in conjunction with a trip), and then Nitrox being a "mostly classroom" course. Usually I would encourage people to do a combined cert trip - 5 AOW dives, plus their two Nitrox dives (i.e. same basic "footprint" as OW2). FYI, I always take my students to the ocean for their checkout dives - my opinion is that "if you can see the other side of it, then it's not really Open Water".

The past couple of years however, I started having problems with poorly trained AOW students who I accepted "sight unseen" because they were friends or relatives of someone in my OW class. One guy in particular scared the bejeebers out of me - his entire OW checkout experience consisted of four dives at Ginnie Springs, with a maximum depth of 20 feet. His air consumption was terrible, and his idea of gas planning was to swim around until he was down to 500 PSI, ascend, and then surface swim back to the boat. He could not stay off the bottom, constantly kicked up sand, and his buoyancy skills were so poor that he had trouble maintaining a simple safety stop without physically holding onto something - one of the more extreme cases of basic lack of competence that I have ever seen (needless to say, he did not earn any AOW certification from me). This made me realize that I probably needed to start pre-screening people before I took them to the ocean - I was starting to get too many "weekend wonders" whose skills were so poor that I couldn't really do anything with them in the time that I had.

What I really wanted was to get them in the pool for an evaluation, but I didn't feel like telling folks "you need to prove to me that you are competent before I will take you diving" - I was afraid that would seem elitist. I needed a way to finesse a pool session, where I could help them with basic skills like buoyancy, air consumption calcs, air sharing, rescue, etc. That was my motivation behind packaging the pool session with the Nitrox course - that way they get a little classroom (the Nitrox part), a little pool (the "PPB" part), and some diving (the AOW part). As I mentioned, the AOW cert is slightly decoupled, in the sense that a person who already has AOW can take the "Nitrox" course and still get something out of it.

The way I handle Silver Advanced is by offering it as the front end of a Master Diver course. I combine the lecture material of Silver Advanced and Gold Master into one course. Minimum entrance requirements to the course are those for Silver Advanced (CPR and dive experience), but to get the Master they must also be Rescue qualified. So I teach the combined course, and those who are Rescue qualified wind up with Master, while those who are not get Silver Advanced (but if they complete Rescue within some timeframe, they get an automatic "upgrade" to Master). The dive portion of the course is 11 dives - we do 4 dives in a local quarry to do most of the skills (and satisfy their fresh water and "full wetsuit" requirements), and then 7 dives in the ocean to complete the certification. With crediting of dives from OW2 and AOW (which is allowed under standards), they still get their minimum number of dives for both certs. (FYI, I have always done Silver Advanced in this way, since I started teaching it).

So my current "curriculum" is actually three courses:

• OW2 (consisting of classroom, pool, and 7 dives)
• AOW + Nitrox (consisting of classroom, pool, and 7 dives)
• Silver Advanced + Gold Master (consisting of classroom, pool, and 11 dives in a 4+7 combination)

And of course they must get Rescue in there somewhere as well.

With each of the courses having 7 ocean dives, I can take all the students on one certification trip, and then just schedule different combinations of dives for different groups. This gives them all a chance to interact with each other, and allows the entry-level students to get a taste of what's in store for them in the later courses (i.e. more "free marketing"). It also allows the more experience divers to assume something of a leadership role within the group (that whole "mentoring" thing).

OK, sorry that ran so long. Again, I hope it was worth the read.

-JimG

Edited by JimG, 20 February 2008 - 08:42 AM.

[drbill]

When I finally got OW certified (after diving for 8 years without a cert), the course I took through L. A. County (LAC) included much of what is currently taught in BOW, AOW and Rescue. Of course it was a three week course with two weekend dives (shore and boat). I don't know what it cost since the school I was teaching for paid the cert fees.

When agencies like PADI came into being, many of their instructors were initially trained by LAC. The agencies decided to split the content of the long course into smaller, bite-sized chunks. Some believe this was done for increased revenue, however I'm not sure of the original motivation.

To teach a class like the one I took in 1969 would be very expensive... I'd estimate about $1,000 or more in today's dollars. If the initial financial hurdle were that high, I doubt that many would take up the sport. I'd like to think that the motivation to split course content into separate certs was in part out of a desire to get more people involved in diving, not just to enhance revenue. But then, I still believe in Santa and the Easter bunny.

[peterbj7]

That sounds great, but in a highly competitive environment such as here where most people are after instant gratification it simply wouldn't work. Success here is determined not by anything to do with quality but by how much marketing you have, how much commission you pay people for sending customers your way, and how trivially slick you can make the customer's experience. A resort environment is a depressing place for a wannabe dive professional.

[Walter]

Jim, do you know Ken Nemeth?

[JimG]

Jim, do you know Ken Nemeth?

Yes, I do - haven't spoken to him since DEMA last year, but we will occasionally cross paths around town.

-JimG

[JimG]

That sounds great, but in a highly competitive environment such as here where most people are after instant gratification it simply wouldn't work. ... A resort environment is a depressing place for a wannabe dive professional.

I can certainly understand that. As I mentioned in a previous posting, I do not teach through a dive shop, so I have a little more flexibility (and a little less financial pressure) to do things the way I want them done.

-JimG

[jeff]

I don't want to pay the 4-5 dollars for a tank of air, so I have no intrest in a ten dollar tank of nitrox for just one dive, I would be spending more in air than gas every weekend.

[pir8]

I don't want to pay the 4-5 dollars for a tank of air, so I have no intrest in a ten dollar tank of nitrox for just one dive, I would be spending more in air than gas every weekend.

Just because you certify to dive Nitrox doesn't mean you have to dive it all the time. Just means that you can when it will be beneficial to you for your bottom time. Like on vacation.

[peterbj7]

If you're just doing a single dive, not too deep and not too long, then there's no need for nitrox, either as your only dive gas or for deco purposes.

Nitrox really comes into its own for holiday divers when you're doing three or more dives a day, or for your final dives before flying when you want the biggest safety margin possible.