AS A DIVING INSTRUCTOR, I am constantly frustrated by the attitudes of training agencies to training materials. Those provided for instructors are often of poor quality and out of date. There are mistakes in the text, in worked examples, and in the student exam papers.
     I get tired of apologising to students for the mistakes in manuals for which I am charging them money.
     Even when the quality is acceptable, they go and change the contents a few months later and render it useless. Do I get a discount or a refund? No chance. I have to fork out and start all over again.
     I am not picking on any agency. None of them really shines.
     I don't know any instructors who are happy with the quality and value for money they get from the agencies but they have learnt to be philosophical. They put their hearts and souls into providing good training for students who go away with happy memories of a great instructor. The agency is remembered fondly in the instructor's shadow.
     So why the poor quality? Good training material takes a lot of time and money to design, write and publish. Standards change and diving changes. Publication cycle times mean that support materials always lag behind the current standards.
     Most agencies claim that they make no money from training material, aiming only to cover publishing and distribution costs. Their income comes from certification and membership fees.
     Which brings me to the solution that many instructors are now touting on the Internet. Electronic distribution over the web is as good as free, and on a CD costs only pennies. Why not just give it away?
     Restructure the way agencies are funded so that all training material is freely available, and any overhead costs of developing the material and administering certifications are covered by certification fees. These may be higher, but the net cost of training would be the same or lower. And think of all the trees that would be saved.
     Not all students have access to a computer and at least some of the material needs to be on paper, but the agencies don't have to print that. Instructors can print and copy it locally.
     Training Agency Big Cheese steps back in amazement. "Make all our proprietary training material available where anyone can read it? Where our intellectual property is available for anyone to steal?"
     I'm afraid Mr Big Cheese is deluded. Anyone can get hold of that intellectual property already in a paper manual. Has he never heard of photocopiers?
     Pirating of training materials goes on now. Giving away electronic training material and living off certification fees is actually a strategy to beat the pirates.
     That takes care of distribution costs but it doesn't fix the quality problem. Which brings me to another strategy that is realistic only online - "open source", the idea that material is collectively owned and maintained by everyone on the Internet. It already works for much computer software.
     All those instructors reading and downloading training material can just as easily edit and correct problems and send the changes back. What used to be a small pool of senior instructors preparing training material in relative isolation now becomes a much larger pool of real instructors working together.
     Of course, there has to be some means of approving changes and arbitrating between conflicting ones, and that again can be done over the Internet. A few people would manage the process. Some diving instructors would almost certainly be willing to take on part of the responsibilities without pay, as already happens with open-source software.
     Enterprising diving instructors are already posting their own versions of training material on a few websites, but these tend to be postings of individual efforts rather than collectively edited, reviewed and approved documents. And their status with the training agencies is at best regarded as supplementary to the official paper manuals.
     So which agency will be the first to give away all its training material over the Internet, or even become open-source?
     The big boys will probably change only if forced to do so by market pressure, so it is more likely to be one of the smaller agencies, which is where disaffected instructors already go.
     Perhaps it will be one of the technical agencies, where most instructors are already fairly technically minded and the small volume of material counts against glossy paper publishing.
     Or perhaps it will be an agency where the management is ultimately accountable to the membership. Perhaps the world's first open-source diver training agency could come about as a membership resolution and popular vote.
     Whichever agency it is, it will get my allegiance as an instructor. And I won't be the only one to vote with my feet.
     Or rather, with my modem.