[Paddlewise] Instructor certification

I kept hoping others would pile on and discuss the ACA certification  topic,
but to no avail.  I'm going to try one more time to get a thread started-up
on this issue.  

The ACA is currently establishing the content and certification for
additional sea kayaking courses. I belive it is important for us to discuss
this topic now and potentially impact the decisions made by the ACA.  

Consider the goal of the proposed sea kayaking courses.  My understanding is
that the ACA wants to define standard content for the courses so there is
uniformity across the country.  It is also my understanding that the ACA
wants to provide an instructor certification program so the consumer  has
the  ACA's stamp of approval concerning the quality of the instructors.   

These are commendable goals that I suspect many of us can support.  To
achieve these goals, however, you need a large pool of certified instructors
throughout the country.  In other words, you need a certification process
that is sufficient to control quality without making it so prohibitively
painful that candidate instructors will ignore it.  In other words, the ACA
needs to balance its desire to control quality with the need for a large
pool of qualified, certified instructors.  A separate certificate for each
course would undully shrink the pool.  Very few potential instructors could
afford to acquire the full range of certificates  --- even if their skills
supported teaching the full slate of courses.

I propose that a single advanced sea kayaking instructors certificate be
defined so it covers the full set of courses.  This means a person would
only need to hold two certificates to teach any ACA sea kayaking course.
This is a reasonable cost in time and money for an instructor to pay --
hence supporting a larger pool of potential instructors.  

The downside of a single certificate is the ACA would have a reduced level
of confidence in the instructor for any one of the courses.  I think the
reduction in confidence, however, can be reduced to an acceptable level by
carefully designing the curiculum of the advanced sea kayaking course.  A
single instructors workshop can cover surf technique, greenland paddling,
rolling and the other required topics.  You don't need a full workshop for
each one.  Remember, the assumptioin is made that the candidate instructors
already pocess the skills required for the certificate.  Hence, you can pack
a great deal into a single workshop.

Are there any ACA officials out there in paddlewise-land who can comment on
this?  

I know some of you "out there" support yourselves with Kayak instruction.
What do you think?  Doesn't a separate certificate for each course make it
difficult for you to build up a staff of certified instructors and offer the
full slate of courses?  Wouldn't it be important for your business to have a
more streamlined certification process?

--Tim

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