The M3T initiative continues the development of eLearning for the maritime community, but also exposes some of its limitations. Using the STCW-required Basic Safety and Training (BST) course as a perfect example, some training material could be delivered online; with the student taking the on-line section delivered by a particular school and then to another approved facility to take the practical “hands on” portion. This provides a more efficient use of physical resources as well as being less expensive with savings in travel and lodging. The possibilities for other physical and fiscal economies of scale are probably as wide as the eWorld that connects the classroom to countless students who might not otherwise be able to afford to go.
Assessment is Primary
It is often the case that we give a great deal more thought to training than we do to assessment. Your training may be excellent at this moment, but without quality assessments you have no way of knowing this for sure, and you won’t have the tools necessary to keep it on track and continuously improve it. It is a primary safety and operations tool to:
- Determine whether a candidate is fit for duty
- Determine what gaps in knowledge and skills exist for a candidate
- Provide key performance indicators for your organization to be used as a basis for analysis and continuous improvement.
But as hard as it is to assess someone’s skills and knowledge, true assessment in the maritime industry needs to do more than that. It needs to assess their cognitive abilities as well. Can the candidate assimilate contrasting information and synthesize it into a plan of action when presented with unexpected events or incidents? There is simply no way to know for sure. As such, it is something that the academic community has been wrestling with for ages, and many consider it to be as much art as it is science.
Having said this, there is still much we can do to improve the validity and reliability of the assessments we administer on board a vessel. A little bit of knowledge and planning can go a long way.
Assessment is Incentive to Learn
The second answer is, to me, the most important. If nothing else, assessment is incentive to learn. Every candidate knows that successful assessment performance is their key to employment.
This is an important fact to keep in mind because anything a trainer does to purposely, “teach to the test”,