Welcome to ScubaBoard, the world's largest scuba diving community. Registration is not required to read the forums, but we encourage you to join. Joining has its benefits and enables you to participate in the discussions.
Benefits of registering include
Although much of it can possibly be done online, I think you really need to have hands on component. My own training, I feel, was quite poor. We spent hours (it seemed) looking at pictures of exploded tanks (OK, OK, OK! We get the picture!), which could have been done online. We could have done a lot of the other stuff online as well. The most valuable part of the class--which we barely had time for because of all the exploded tank pictures--was actually inspecting the tanks the instructor brought in, most of which were not passing tanks. Having to spot the failure points on a real tank was quite valuable. There is a big difference between seeing a picture of a tiny crack hidden in the threads in the neck and actually finding one yourself. When you find such a potential tank buster and see how easy it is to miss, you don't look so kindly on people who buy VIS stickers online and just slap them on their tanks every year.
Inspecting the neck for cracks is a critical part of a visual inspection. You have special tools to help with it. When a tank fails hydro because of a crack, it has usually been missed by a Visual inspection a couple of times. You really don't want to be waiting 5 years to spot them.
Unfortunately, too true.
My job for the past dozen years or so has been online education. I am the co-author of the iNACOL guidelines for online scientific investigations. I know how it can be done, but there would have to be very high quality simulations to make it work well, and those would be very expensive to create. It would take a big class turnout to make it financially worthwhile.
