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Mike you wrote <<<Funny, I would have thought lower insurance coverage would have come from striking a more defensible contract with the customer.>>> <<<Which standard is easier to defend? That you taught a diver what they paid you for, or that you promised that diver would be forever "safe" ?>>> From and educational design standpoint the only way to make a training program truly defensible in the eyes of the law and for insurance purposes is to design the complete program from the ground up. This means that the student text, the presentation material, the instructor training material, the support products (ie: tables, charts) and in-water skill requirments, and the written exams must be designed as a cohesive program. In addition to program design, there should be a process for interim testing during the learning process which assures that learning has taken place along the way. This is usually done with section reviews. The instructor should retain copies of those. When a course is typically designed to be defnesible it is usually broken up into modular learning packages, each section building upon the previous sections. From a design standpoint it's an ehaustive process when writing a program since the author/designers constantly must be checking to be sure that what needs to be taught in chapter Y had a foundation built in chapter X. A training program must have ALL the information necessary for ANY qualified instructor to teach the program. Then the instructor sucesfully communicates the material and adds to it personal experience, expertise, technique, and personality. A series of check-lists, interim quizes, final exams, and open water evaluations where an instructor can track a students over all performance, is what makes a program defensible. From a legal standpoint the issuance of a certification card in any level of diving only means that at the time the student was evaluated they were able to perform well enough to warrant certification and that the instructor had a resonable belief that the studen could retain the information and skills into the future. However...... most people will forget how to do highly task loaded skills if they are not repeated at least 7 times and are not used within the next 30 days. It is for this reason that learing verification (exams and quality materials help this) However, it is very easy for even a well designed program to become a dog in the courtroom and in the classroom if the instructor does NOT follow the program. If they leave things out because of "personal preference" or if they add things that are outside the scope of that particular programs standards and procedures that are in another higher level course. In the long run, the progressive process of teaching, learning, testing, performing works best for most students and works best for remaining a defensible program. As for your second question, NEVER tell them that its safe, and you wont have to worry that you did. Use terms like "this proceudre helps minimize risk" or using this gas properly helps minimize the effects of........" Safe means without risk and diving certainly has risk. Joel Silverstein -- Send mail for the `techdiver' mailing list to `techdiver@aquanaut.com'. Send subscribe/unsubscribe requests to `techdiver-request@aquanaut.com'.
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