Training Materials, which is better?

[Chris12day]

The USN?!?!?! As in "Accelerate your life" USN??? That's freakin' awesome! I've never heard anybody say that...at least they let you blow $hit up. Maybe I should try to get a c-card from them...do they offer a weekend course? knotical that is the funniest thing I've heard all week, I'm gonna share this one!

I think they do offer one weekend a month and two weeks in the summer....The pay is about a DM's salary. If you are really good, they let you go overseas for extended time periods too....

Happy Diving

 

[Kingpatzer]

As a PADI person, I have to say that the PADI materials AT ALL LEVELS have the worst authoring, editing, layout and printing I can imagine short of having monkeys finger painting pages after kindergarten kids doing the typesetting and the whole thing being edited by a norwegian sled dog.

 

[brettwolf]

In short everyone is correct! It is all about THE INSTRUCTOR my instructor started me as PADI for Open Water then NAUI for Advanced. Some of my specialties are SSI. Long story short my instructor guided me through what he believed was the best course with the best information for my needs. No one program has all of the answers but a good instructor should have most of them!

 

[Jim Lapenta]

As a PADI person, I have to say that the PADI materials AT ALL LEVELS have the worst authoring, editing, layout and printing I can imagine short of having monkeys finger painting pages after kindergarten kids doing the typesetting and the whole thing being edited by a norwegian sled dog.

Holy crap King! I just saw this and can now go to bed with smile on my face and spittle on the monitor. And I damn near peed myself laughing!

 

[TSandM]

You know, as part of my divemaster class, I've had to go back through a lot of the PADI written materials . . . and they aren't that bad. If you can get past the underlying attitude -- which is that diving students aren't very smart, aren't very educated, and have the motivation of hamsters -- the materials cover the information that's needed, use colorful anecdotes to make it "live", tell you what you are going to learn, what you're learning, and what you have learned, and incorporate simultaneous interrogative reinforcement. If somebody really spends a little time reading them and doing the quizzes and reviews, basic information is likely to stick.

The Encyclopedia is similar. There is a LOT of good information in that book, and I think it ought to be owned and read by most people who dive. The new version is particularly good -- I read it about a year ago, and learned a surprising amount about oceans, acidity, global currents and the like.

The problem with PADI is that they have identified a target audience, and it isn't me. It may WELL be their typical student, but it isn't me. GUE's materials are much more my style, but they don't suit everybody. I don't know how you create materials which will satisfy Thalassamania, me, the guy who works in the motorcycle shop, and the 15 year old kid whose dad is recertifying. You can write to the lowest common denominator, which I believe PADI has done, and you can defend that. Or you can make a decision about who you want to teach, and write your materials to that person, which is what I believe GUE has done. That's not an effective way to reach all and sundry, but GUE doesn't want to do that, anyway.

So asking who has the best materials is an inadequately defined question. Best materials for whom?

 

[Diver0001]

As a PADI person, I have to say that the PADI materials AT ALL LEVELS have the worst authoring, editing, layout and printing I can imagine short of having monkeys finger painting pages after kindergarten kids doing the typesetting and the whole thing being edited by a norwegian sled dog.

I mostly use the Dutch translations and I have to say that there are a lot of little inconsistenties, typos, poorly translated phrases and words and such but the authoring and didactic structure of their stuff is really good. The more I use it, the more impressed I become with how easily students learn the basic theory and how long they retain it. At the shop where I work students often come for scuba reviews *years* after reading the OW book and retain in most cases everything except the table theory. Now THAT's what I call good authoring! The fact that they're written for a target audience with perhaps less than a high-school education is a function of the market they have and it influences the materials. It's a style that may not appeal to everyone. Their Encyclopedia of Recreational Diving is down right good.

In some cases the material falls short of talking about things that I find important, but I just add those bits myself. Contrary to the popular disinformation about PADI by those who don't like the system, the instructor actually has complete freedom for deeping out the theory to their heart's content. A theme in this thread that should be emphasized again is that you really should learn diving from an instructor and not just fix your hope on the book having everything in it that you need to know.

It's nice that they don't tell you everything anyway or you'd have nothing to talk about with your students... LOL

The worst materials I've ever seen are the IANTD ones. It's like a confused spaghetti-like stream of consciousness trance induced talking in tongues. While rich in details, you have to read them carefully (or twice, which would be torture). The books I have for Adv EANx, Trimix and Ice diving are all written in monotone courier wall of text format and are a real grind to get through. It turns information that I'm essentially interested in, into a dry boring read and at some point you just have to put it down because you realize that all you're trying to do get "get through it".... at that point you're not learning anything anymore. It's also tough to quickly find stuff if you use their books for reference. The indexes, in as much as I can remember them even having an index, are 5 alarm crap. I've heard that IANTD has started making new materials that are better. I hope so. But then again, you don't take IANTD courses for the books. You take them for the under-water bits...

I've seen one or two GUE books but I havn't taken any of their courses. In terms of depth of the material I think from what I've seen their stuff is pretty darned good and it's laid out in a way that makes it fairly straightforward to read and retain.

R..

 

[Jim Lapenta]

We use a non agency produced text book for our OW class. Dennis Graver's Scuba Diving is one of the best texts for OW Divers I've seen. No ads, no buy this or buy that, just good solid info in a well organized, easy to read, yet intelligently presented fashion. It does not talk down to people. Our work books are designed to follow the text and yet give instructors great freedom to add to and augment based on the needs and interests of their students. We will also provide custom workbooks to suit the individual instructors teaching style and local conditions. they need only provide the written material they wish to cover.

I personally like the subject format we have but there are others who use the dive profile format. Many will also create their own handouts, references, etc to give their students that cover local conditions, special interests, and other info they feel will add to the safety, knowledge, and skill of their students. Every student of mine gets a copy of my who is responsible article the first session, a handout on gas management covering SAC, Rock Bottom, and the principles of 1/3rds, 1/6ths, etc. There is also one on safe diving practices and dive planning. In addition I have whole list of websites, books, youtube videos, etc that they can checkout and reference during the class while at home. There are actually two workbooks. One for classroom use and another for home use that reinforces the classroom session just covered and prep for the next.

Other classes and specialties are in development to go along with the current ones we now have such as nitrox, Ice, DRAM, Drysuit, Search and Recovery/Public Safety, Full Face Mask, etc. I've written one myself- Underwater Navigation that has been under review and though not in print is available on disk on an as requested basis. I'm also intimately involved in new AOW guidelines and other instructors are developing new courses as we speak.

Having actual instructors write courses that teach what they write and have real world experience in the subject matter is, IMO, much better than that developed by so-called education experts. After all these "experts" and their techniques are many of the same ones involved in public education in the US today. And look at the state that is in. Kids graduating who cannot make change, tell time on a regular clock, or compose a complete sentence. Classes and techniques designed to get them to parrot info for standardized tests and out the door ASAP. Is that the kind of dive education you want?

 

[BuoyantC]

YMCA allowed instructors to use their choice of materials, and one of the problems we saw was trying to cover too much information. Speaking primarily of the basic open water course, it seems better to present well organised basic information in hopes that the student will remember the important stuff than to expect them to remember a much broader range of information. If the interest is there, the student can expand their knowledge, but otherwise what will they retain a few months after they pass the final exam?

 

[Jim Lapenta]

Quite a bit when it is presented over the course of 6-8 weeks rather than a couple weekends. No different than college. Stuff I crammed for was forgotten within a few days or hours of the test depending on course and sometimes amount of alcohol involved. Some of the items I actually studied over the semester are still in my head and easy to recall 30 years later even though I rarely if ever use them.

 

[Kingpatzer]

You know, as part of my divemaster class, I've had to go back through a lot of the PADI written materials . . . and they aren't that bad. If you can get past the underlying attitude -- which is that diving students aren't very smart, aren't very educated, and have the motivation of hamsters -- the materials cover the information that's needed, use colorful anecdotes to make it "live", tell you what you are going to learn, what you're learning, and what you have learned, and incorporate simultaneous interrogative reinforcement. If somebody really spends a little time reading them and doing the quizzes and reviews, basic information is likely to stick.

The Encyclopedia is similar. There is a LOT of good information in that book, and I think it ought to be owned and read by most people who dive. The new version is particularly good -- I read it about a year ago, and learned a surprising amount about oceans, acidity, global currents and the like.

I'm not saying that the books have no value. I'm saying they are horribly written, are atrociously edited, have craptastic layout, etc. The information a student needs is there, but it the books are very badly done as books.

For example, you'll have a call-out box on one page in blue, you turn the page, and the whole next page is that same color blue. Now, is that a continuation of the call-out box? Is it another call out box? Most likely it's just continuation of the main text because PADI splashes color randomly around the pages. Which not only makes much of the content hard to read for people with vision problems (I've heard more than one elderly student tell me they simply couldn't read sections of the material due to the color choices) but makes it hard to follow intuitively. They are violating good layout rules by not using layout elements consistently.

Editing is another issue. The PADI encyclopedia has some frankly inexcusable editing errors. It will tell you that one Joule is 107 ergs. Which is kind of interesting since for the rest of the universe it is 10^7 ergs. Missing such a clear and obvious statement of fact indicates a very sloppy job of editing and proof reading. Which isn't surprising since the author and editor of that section is the same person. I've yet to find a PADI book that didn't have at least one major editorial oversight. Good editing costs money, but PADI has it to spend and chooses not to.

Phrasing and flow are very poor and inconsistent throughout PADI materials. Again showing a lack of concern for the editorial process. The editor and the author are frequently the same person. There's a reason that such a practice is a bad idea, and PADI materials provide a good example of the outcome of violating such a basic publishing norm.

The info is there, I agree with that. But I contend that the basic workmanship of the books are, well, at the level of a middle school newspaper when the teacher's out with pneumonia and the sub is Larry the Cable Guy. They are in desperate need of a editorial and artistic competence.