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 *************************************************************************** PaddleWise Paddling Mailing List Submissions: paddlewise_at_lists.intelenet.net Subscriptions: paddlewise-request_at_lists.intelenet.net Website: http://www.gasp-seakayak.net/paddlewise/ ***************************************************************************
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