As a diving instructor I am constantly frustrated by the attitudes of training agencies to training materials.
The material provided for diving instructors is often of poor quality. It is often out of date. There are mistakes in the text, mistakes in worked examples, and mistakes in the student exam papers. I get tired of apologising to students for the mistakes in the manuals that I am charging them money for. Bloated gloss is often mistaken for quality.
Even when the quality of material is acceptable and I splash out and buy it, they go and change it a few months later and all I have spent is invalid. Would they give a discount or refund on the now value-less material I hold? No chance. I have to fork out and start all over again.
I am not going to pick on anyone in particular. There is no agency who really shines and my comments here are directed equally at all training agencies.
I don't know any diving instructors who are really happy with the quality and value for money they are getting from the training agencies. Many just take it philosophically, accepting that making the most of a poor deal is just part of the job. They put their hearts and soles into providing good quality training to their students, and the students go away happy because they remember what a great instructor they had. The training agency is remembered fondly in the instructor's shadow.
So what is the justification for such poor service? Good quality training material takes a lot of time and money to design, write and publish. Standards change and diving changes. Publication cycle time means that support material always lags behind the current standards. Even if it could be published fast enough, that just exacerbates the problem of de-valuing existing investment.
Most training agencies claim that they make no money off training material. All they do is cover publishing and distribution costs. Their income comes from certification and membership fees.
Which brings me to the answer that many instructors are now touting on the Internet. Electronic distribution over the web is as good as free. Electronic distribution on a CD is only a few pennies for the media. Why not just give it away?
Re-structure the way training agencies are financed so that all training material is freely available, and any overhead costs of developing the material and administering certifications is covered by the certification fee. Certification fees may be higher, but the net cost of training would be the same or lower. And think of all the trees that would be saved.
This isn't the perfect answer. There are situations where students don't have access to a computer and at least a proportion of the student material needs to be on paper. But the agencies don't have to print that. Instructors can print and copy it locally.
Mr training agency big cheese steps back in amazement. "Make all our proprietary training material available over the web? Where anyone can read it? Where our intellectual property is available for anyone to steal?"
I am afraid Mr Big Cheese is deluded. It's not as if anyone can't get that intellectual property already in a paper manual. Has he heard of photo copiers?
Any amount of pirating of training materials the agencies are worried about already goes on. It isn't rocket science. Giving away electronic training material and living off the certification fees is actually a strategy to beat pirating of training material.
So that takes care of distribution costs. But it doesn't fix the quality problem. In some cases all we instructors would be getting is poor quality electronic material where we used to get poor quality paper.
Which brings me to another strategy that is only realistic with the Internet. Open source. The idea that material is collectively owned and maintained by everyone on the Internet. It already works for a lot of computer software, so maybe it could work for diver training material.
All the instructors reading and downloading training material can just as easily edit and correct problems and then send the changes back. What used to be a small pool of senior instructors preparing training material in relative isolation now becomes a much larger pool of real instructors working together.
Off course there has to be some means of approving changes and arbitrating between conflicting changes, and that can just as easily be done over the Internet. There will be potentially hundreds if not thousands of instructors available to read posted changes and comment on which get incorporated back into the training material.
There needs to be a few people to actually manage this process. With all the diving instructors out there, some are sure to be willing to take on part of the management responsibilities without pay. It already happens with open source software, and I can't believe diving instructors are that different to programmers.
There are already a few web sites where enterprising diving instructors are posting their own versions of diver training material. A step in the right direction, but these tend to be postings of individual efforts rather than collectively edited, reviewed and approved documents. And their official status with the training agencies is at best regarded as supplementary to the official paper manuals rather than replacements for them.
So which training agency will be the first to give away all their training material over the Internet or even become open source? I can't see any of the big boys being this radical. They are just too entrenched in their ways. They won't change until they are forced to do so by market pressure.
It is more likely to be one of the smaller agencies, where disaffected instructors already go to vote with their feet. Maybe one of the technical agencies, where most instructors are already by definition fairly technically minded and the small volume of material counts against glossy paper publishing. Or maybe an agency where the management is ultimately accountable to the membership. Maybe the world's first Internet open source diver training agency could come about as a membership resolution and popular vote.
Whoever it is, the first agency to fully embrace the concept will get my allegiance as an instructor. And I won't be the only one to vote with my feet. Or maybe I should say vote with my modem.