STUDYING ON BOARD - THE FUTURE OF DISTANCE LEARNING

NAUTICAL TRAINING: AIMS AND OBJECTIVES

Members of the Nautical Institute have a very wide range of skills and experience. Recruitment and training of the next generation should aim to provide similar quality and diversity. For most companies, the aim will be to provide good junior and senior officers at sea, but some officers will be selected or self-selected to rise into the ranks of senior company management or fill the roles of harbour masters, port managers, maritime lawyers, surveyors, administrators and college lecturers, where sea experience is an important part of the preparation for their new roles. For all nautical professionals, career development will require a mixture of nautical education and practical training.

STUDYING: WHEN AND WHERE?

Most jobs and professions consist of two parts: learning the theory and learning the practical work. Seafaring is no different. In the last hundred years there have been a lot of arguments about which should come first. Some countries sent young people to sea first, to learn about ships and their working environment before opening their books to study, others have “front loaded” training with a long college course. Which is best?

IN AT THE DEEP END

In the past, Scandinavian countries favoured the “straight to sea” method, sending young boys to sea to “learn the ropes” – a bit like throwing someone into the deep end of the swimming pool when teaching them to swim. Most survived and became good practical seamen, with a lot of self-confidence, good team members, understanding their ships, their work and the sea. We sometimes hear older Nautical Institute members regretting the loss of “common sense and good basic seamanship” among the younger computer-literate generation. They may forget that their own common sea sense was learned through many years of hard work at sea. The straight-to-sea method suits the youngsters who prefer action to book learning and find school work boring and see it as largely irrelevant to the rest of their lives.

A major shortcoming of this approach is that it discourages many young people who have the ability to rise to higher academic levels (BSc and MSc). This came to light many years ago in Norway when the Storting (parliament) decreed that all nautical college lecturers should have a degree level qualification, but there were no degree level seafarers to teach the teachers.

The Norwegian Institute of Technology (NTH), Trondheim, was chosen to put on a one-year course for nautical lecturers and I was asked to put together a team from the UK to teach nautical subjects in the early years (the UK had been offering degree courses since the mid 1960s at Cardiff, Liverpool, Plymouth, etc). The course was centred around NTH-Sinteff, the Norwegian Ship Research Institute’s naval architecture centre.

One thing I learned from this experience is that any profession which is below graduate level (as most nautical professionals were at the time), will have great difficulty in getting its voice heard amongst professions with graduate level status (naval architects, chartered engineers, economists, lawyers, etc). To be listened to, you need to talk to people in their own professional language at their professional level. The excellent rapport these days between the Nautical Institute, the Institute of Marine Engineering Science and Technology (IMarEST), and the Royal Institution of Naval Architects (RINA) shows that things are better now (I still think that all Naval Architects should do a few sea voyages before they design ships, but that is another subject!).

BOOKS, BOOKS AND MORE BOOKS

In more recent years, many countries (Germany, the USA, Japan, China, Korea, Pakistan, France, Portugal, etc.) provide degree level courses for aspiring seafarers where they spend one, two or even up to five years studying theory before embarking on sea careers. In some ways this is a natural progression from general education in school, and the young people certainly reach higher academic levels than they would if the went straight to sea. This pleases parents, headmasters and careers advisers as they see the young person making the best of their ability to absorb knowledge and train their minds to continue learning through life. It can be very frustrating for the young person who is keen to “spread his or her wings” and travel the world.

By the 1970s, Kobe and Tokyo Universities of the Mercantile Marine in Japan and the Hochschule für Nautik in Bremen had a long history of offering excellent degree level courses. In Japan, many of the graduates wanted to go straight into jobs in the shore side of ship management, and in Germany they found that the students had so much knowledge that they became very apprehensive when it came to doing simple practical tasks on their first voyage to sea.

Academic courses can be made more interesting by the inclusion of a lot of practical projects including boatwork and simulator exercises – even short sea voyages, etc. I recall that Captain George Singleton, who taught Hydrographic Surveying on the BSc course at Liverpool Polytechnic, each year took away a group of individual students to survey a muddy estuary or harbour entrance, and a week later brought back an integrated team who enjoyed working together. They also had a far better grasp of charting and the value of charts.

THE ROLE OF TRAINING SHIPS

To complement classroom studies, Japan has used (and still uses) training ships as part on their regime based upon the Maritime Universities (Tokyo, Kobe). Captain Sano, Master of one of their sail training vessels, told me his colleagues regarded college as a “soft” option and so they put in place a very rigorous physical and practical training regime on board to instil discipline. The facilities on the modern Seiko Maru are excellent and the cadets are a credit to the Japanese Merchant Marine.

The United States and Argentina have also been keen on training ships, often based upon maritime colleges and providing the ultimate end of course experience for cadets. Sometimes I was surprised they made it across the Atlantic with all the “rookies” on board! Many other training ships have their tales to tell. Visit the web site www.rakaia.co.uk for stories of British training ships and some wonderful paintings by Marine Artist Robert Lloyd.

MIX AND MATCH

The United Kingdom and most Commonwealth countries used a “sandwich” course format where periods in college and periods at sea were alternated in a steady progression through cadet – first watchkeeping qualification – first mate – Masters (command) qualification. In theory, this should have given the best balance between the teaching of theory and practice, with a short pre-sea course followed by sea time to learn basic seamanship, followed by more learning in college, back to sea to understudy the officers for the next step on the ladder, and so on through to qualification as a Master Mariner. By and large it worked well, but it had to fight parents, headmasters and careers staff, to get young people to sea at a young age. It did not fit the pattern of most other professions, it was not widely supported by the government, a lot of the expense fell upon the employers or the students themselves, and it was wasteful in terms of time and travel. Most people who completed it were satisfied that they were masters of their craft.

More recently, the UK tried to “massage” its training programmes into National Diploma and Higher Diploma Courses, Business and Technology Education Council formats, national vocational qualification systems and more recently Foundation Degree schemes. The rationale for each change was either to get government money, to give the students a qualification that has parity with other professions and was respected by seafarers, their families and others outside the industry. Never did we sit down with a blank sheet of paper and consider how best to prepare people to reach their highest attainable level as nautical professionals.

DISTANCE LEARNING

On board is the place to learn practical seamanship. The classroom, logically, is the place to learn theory. Learning theory at sea is not easy. Fifty years ago it was almost impossible! Cadets were expected to sit in their cabins and struggle with badly written correspondence courses supported by very poor textbooks like Nicholl’s Guide, with very little interest and support from anyone. Tutors ashore could not get the answer to queries back for about six weeks and the officers on board normal trading ships were not very helpful (training ships with school teachers on board were different). Satellite communications changed all that. Between 1982 and 1985 Liverpool Polytechnic carried out two studies into satellite communications, first with a marine version of Teletext, and then with a mailbox system that allowed a seafarer to put a query into a mail box by 9am and get the answer by 5pm the same evening. That innovation has become part one of the global satellite services today, which facilitates distance learning on board. Distance learning courses are also delivered and supported by CD-ROMs, DVDs, computers, the Internet, mail and email.

To be effective, distance learning courses need to be prepared to a very high standard. The tutor must think through the questions a student might ask in the classroom and build the answers into the course. The course must:

1. Have clear learning objectives – constructing the course modules around precise and detailed information
2. Be in convenient “bite size” modules so seafarers can study at times when it suits them and their work schedules
3. Be cost-effective (even if they appear to be expensive, they may work out cheaper if compared with the travel and living costs of study ashore)
4. Be interactive and visually stimulating through the inclusion of video, narration, text, graphics and animation
5. Maintain interest through student participation in case studies, portfolio work, role-playing, problem solving and assessment questioning
6. Be consistent – through the auditing (by Flag States) and thoroughness of course administration services
7. Be supported by a dedicated course tutor, available to give advice

Quality for distance learning courses can be assured by using Open University-style steering groups, which comprise individuals with different expertise in a range of maritime fields. Courses can delivered either by CD-ROM, as part of a library rental scheme, or incorporated within dedicated mini-computers, which allow access to hundreds of supporting safety and technical packages. With the latest advances of broadband access to shipping, web-deliverable courses are already becoming a fact of life. If only there were more spare time on board to complete them!