PADI sells C-Cards and access to learning materials.
- A few students, long classes and pool time is expensive and makes a little money.
- Some students, medium length classes and less pool time makes more money
- A lot of students, weekend classes and a little pool time makes even more money
- A ton of students, no classes and no pool time makes a ton of money.
It shows up better on a graph, but I don't feel like spending time making one.
This is not a connective logical step in the process. It is a completely different situation and assumes a fact not in evidence, as I will explain later.
I find it a lot easier to spot someone thinking "huh???" in person. It's extremely difficult to do online...
Thank you for explaining the basics of online education. I have been involved with online eduation at some level since 1995. I founded and administered a fully online school within a public school district in 2001. I co-founded Colorado Online Learning, the state's official online high school program. I served as the Director of Curriculum and Instruction for one of the nation's biggest online education providers, and when that merged with an even larger one, I served as the Executive Manager of Curriculum. I co-authored a treatise on online science instruction for the North American Council for Online Learning. I know something about the challenges of online education, and I know how they are overcome.
...and there's really no incentive anyway.
There is
enormous incentive. When I was with the online education company before my retirement, the presssure on us to have a high quality product with high quality results was intense. If a class was not working as it should, we had to do everything we could to figure out why and make it work. If we did not perform at a high level, we would be out of business.
All PADI cares about is the right answer on the test and a signature on the forms.
More facts not in evidence. See below.
Because if you don't "get" a concept in your stats class, nobody dies.
OK, I totally miss the connection here. You said (implied, actually) that online education lowered the quality of education. I asked why that is true, and I pointed out tht major universities like Stanford have been providing classes online for many years, and asked you why you thought that the education was inferior. Your reply has no connection whatsoever to what I said.
Implicit in everything you write is a belief that it is not possible to deliver the academics of a class like this online effectively. You have given no evidence of this, and there is a world of evidence to the contrary. For example, the passing rates on the AP exams, according to official College Board statistics, are higher for the major online programs than they are for traditional face to face clases. Dr. Clayton Christensen of the Harvard Business School recently published a highly accalimed work (
Disrupting Class: How Disruptive Innocation Will Change the Way the World Learns) that predicts that within a few years, online education will learn how to fully utilize its technical advantages andl totally upend the educational process, bringing startling improvements in student learning. He points out that it is already providing a product comparable to the regular classroom; he thinks it will soon blow the regular classroom away.
I wouldn't call anything you can do in a weekend much of a "requirement", and seeing how both class and pool time have been reduced over the years, the logical partner to "no class time" is "no pool time".
Once again, there is no logical connection. First of all, as I said earlier, the class and pool time requirements have not changed. It is true that some individual instructors or shops have short changed things, but that is mostly done through standards violations, not through policy. Additionally, that level of shortchanging has been going on for many years, so there is no trend. Finally, your conclusion is similar to saying, "I see that Sally has decided to go on a diet. The next logical step is that she will intentionally starve herself to death."
They're a business. Their goal is to make money, not train competent divers. If a diver turns out OK, that's just fine, but the part they really care about is collecting the money and not losing lawsuits. In fact, from a liability perspective, their dream customer would be someone who pays for the class and never dives again.
This is simply not true. In fact, it is just the opposite. If PADI's goal were to have people learn to dive and never dive again, and if it acheived that goal, it would go out of business in no time. PADI as a whole includes dive resorts all over the world, resorts whose entire continued existence depends upon keeping people diving. PADI literature focuses over and over again on what professionals can do to keep divers diving. This is the primary assumed fact not in evidence mentioned earlier. You are assuming that PADI wants the diver to pay up and leave, which is the opposite of reality.
I get this from seeing their classes change over time. It's not difficult to predict.
Please identify those changes. The only one you have mentioned so far is the trend to online education, which you think (without providing any evidence) is somehow a drop in standards.
