Have you pursued cave 1 or tech 1 training, or things like DPV1? That's where the real meat and potatoes start. Fundies is designed to give you the personal skills and team awareness needed to be successful in higher level training. Generally speaking, I don't feel like there is a lot of teaching that can occur to improve someone's buoyancy control or trim in 4 days, a lot of that just requires repetition and intensity in practice in the water and fundies, I feel like is designed to give you the procedures and introduce you to the standards so you can practice on your own to refine your skills to the standards.
Something like this would be a start:
- Just Culture and Class Standards in Training Material
- The eLearning modules should include detailed information about the course standards and the performance expectations students must maintain. Additionally, they should incorporate training on just culture, emphasizing the importance of safety, learning, and accountability over blame.
- Throughout the course, regularly refresh participants on the class standards to ensure they understand and adhere to these expectations. Use well-designed questions during assessments to evaluate how well the course adheres to these standards.
- Mandatory Incident Reporting
- Implement a system requiring instructors to report all safety incidents, such as rapid ascents and buddy separations. OOG, student panic, equipment malfunctions, environmental hazards, etc. These reports, depending on their nature, would trigger investigations looking to understand the context of why this happened. Look at ASRS in general aviation. If a report was proactively filed, disciplinary action is less likely to occur, but punitive actions might still be taken in cases of gross negligence or willful violations. Make it clear that every professional present is responsible for reporting safety incidents, and that they might be subject to certification action if they failed to report.
- Independent Assessments
- Use independent online knowledge tests after certification to verify that students have retained the information they were taught. These tests should be managed by a third-party system that records the results independently of the instructor, providing an unbiased measure of student learning. The certifications would not be issued until these assessments are completed.
- Prior to the above assessment, make sure that a brief learning module is provided on what the standards are in unequivocal language and why reporting is important to improve the overall safety of the system.
- Distribute satisfaction surveys directly to students without instructor involvement, ensuring that students feel free to provide honest feedback.
- Correlating Data from Multiple Sources
- Cross-check data from different sources such as incident reports, student surveys, and follow-up interviews. If an instructor reports a high pass rate but student feedback indicates poor teaching quality, this discrepancy would trigger further investigation.
- Peer Reviews
- Include peer reviews as a regular part of the evaluation process. Instructors can observe each other’s classes and provide feedback, offering another layer of verification that goes beyond self-reported data.
- Automated Data Collection
- Require dive profile data to be uploaded to a QC system for every student on training every dive. This could be implemented similarly to flight data monitoring / Flight operations quality assurance. Parameters are set to determine if events are occurring and if the classes are being conducted to the standards for depth, duration, frequency, ascent rates, bottom times, etc.
