What were the pool sessions like in your OW course?

[boulderjohn]

Done, You concentrate on pool questions, but some scuba courses are not includes pool at all.
So question "HOW MANY pool sessions did you have during your initial scuba certification course?" should have also option - 0
I mean my all course was in open water starting from first lesson.

You raise an important point. All agencies that I know of have "confined water" requirements that are usually done in a pool. They can also be done in "confined open water," an area of open water that has pool-like conditions with respect to depth, clarity, and water movement. Many people did their "pool" sessions in such water, and it is not likely that the instructor explained that this is what was happening. It might be a good idea for the survey to explain that so that new divers are not confused.

If you did not do any sessions in either a pool or confined open water, then that should probably be an option as well. I suspect that would be pretty rare.

 

[RJP]

Done, You concentrate on pool questions, but some scuba courses are not includes pool at all.
So question "HOW MANY pool sessions did you have during your initial scuba certification course?" should have also option - 0
I mean my all course was in open water starting from first lesson.

Yup - the survey was specific to pool sessions.

 

[Roman_66]

Correct, most my education was in confined open water (few reefs around and no current).
Last two or three dives were in real open water.

 

[RJP]

Many people did their "pool" sessions in such water, and it is not likely that the instructor explained that this is what was happening. It might be a good idea for the survey to explain that so that new divers are not confused.

Often, the more "explaining" you do on a survey... the more confused the respondent becomes. Or they simply bail out because of too much stuff to read through.

I also think that "confined water" and "confined open water" are dive pro terms that the average rec diver might not know. (Survey is going out beyond the erudite SB audience.)

If you did not do any sessions in either a pool or confined open water, then that should probably be an option as well. I suspect that would be pretty rare.

I was able to add a "NONE of my sessions were in a pool" choice to the first question. This will help subset out those folks.

---------- Post added April 1st, 2015 at 12:12 PM ----------

Correct, most my education was in confined open water (few reefs around and no current).
Last two or three dives were in real open water.

Hmm... should have been at least FOUR dives in "real open water." (But that's a different thread...)

 

[Jack Hammer]

Perhaps you can add an option next time. I don't recall the exact number of pool dives or quantity of people, I do recall it was the minimum requirements for dives and the maximum people allowed in the class per the standards at the time. I recall this because it came up more than once during training. The given options call for very specific numbers, so I went with my best recollections.

 

[RJP]

The given options call for very specific numbers, so I went with my best recollections.

Perfect - thanks!

 

[Unknown Diver]

Interesting that the number of additional students is requested, but not the instructor/student ratio (which was 1:2 in my class).

 

[RJP]

Interesting that the number of additional students is requested, but not the instructor/student ratio (which was 1:2 in my class).

Thought of that, but was trying to keep number of questions to reasonable amount - 10 in this case. Figured we could largely assume we were looking at 1 instructor for number of students reported. Risk that assumption is bad seemed worth tradeoff of keeping survey short. The longer a survey gets, the fewer people participate.

PS - congrats on first SB post! Hopefully you'll become more "known" here!

---------- Post added April 2nd, 2015 at 05:17 PM ----------

Thought of that, but was trying to keep number of questions to reasonable amount - 10 in this case. Figured we could largely assume we were looking at 1 instructor for number of students reported. Risk that assumption is bad seemed worth tradeoff of keeping survey short. The longer a survey gets, the fewer people participate.

PS - congrats on first SB post! Hopefully you'll become more "known" here!

Edit.

---------- Post added April 2nd, 2015 at 05:18 PM ----------

That was strange...

 

[RJP]

The survey that I'm running about initial scuba training - pool sessions specifically - is getting some pretty good traction. It's also yielding some very interesting preliminary results. (I don't want to spoil the surprise.)

If you've not yet participated in the survey, I really hope that you will take a few moments and so. I'm optimistic that this might be one of the largest response rates I've had to a survey. It has really taken off on multiple social media sites.

Please take 5 minutes to answer a handful of questions about your pool/confined water experience; how many sessions, how long, how many students, when it was, etc. (PS - while survey does say "pool" if you did your "pool" dives in confined open water, please consider that to be "a pool" for purposes of the survey.)

Here's the link:

Pool Sessions in Initial Scuba Training Survey

Will report full results out here when I get a large enough response size to be able to dice and slice the data for some sub-analyses.

If any shop, instructor, group (or dare I say agency) wants a separate link to share with their own mailing list/FB/twitter, etc PM me. Such a link will allow you to get a separate data report for just your participants. The shops/instructors that have shared specific links are getting some very interesting - and actionable - findings.

If anyone wants to share a link on their FB page, another community site, without needing/wanting a separate report that would be great too. Bigger numbers = better analytics. Please PM me (or leave a note here) and I'll give you a different link than the one above - this way we can also compare ScubaBoard divers to non-ScubaBoard divers. That always seems to yield some interesting findings

Thanks for your help!

Ray

 

[Patoux01]

"how many students in pool?" I tick 1, "did you know any of the others?" well, I guess I know myself, but I'm not really someone else? So depending how you get the scores (ie each answer "sheet" separetly or all the answers to the same answer together), you'll get significant bias...