Should eLearning Be Free in The Scuba Diving Industry?

Can there be a balance between online learning being a profit center for dive training agencies and a simple promotional tool for everybody else?

The dive industry is complex. Operating a dive center is like managing six businesses under one roof, one of which is a school teaching scuba diving.

A typical dive certification course includes three segments: theory, pool practice, and open-water diving. Nowadays, the theory part is increasingly provided through eLearning–online courses during which you watch videos, read some text, and answer quizzes.

Dive training agencies manage the online platforms offering these scuba courses. They sell them directly to consumers visiting their website. Some dive training agencies share part of these revenues with the dive center, where the student will go for in-water training.

For dive training agencies, it’s big business. For instance, the recent “digital revision of PADI’s Instructor Development Course resulted in incremental revenue of over $7M in the first year of launch” (source: Designed For Use).

These were not necessarily “new dollars” for PADI. In recent years, training agencies have been trying to use revenues from online learning platforms to offset the drop in selling printed course material. I used to say that training agencies were glorified book publishers. I can’t say that anymore! But what are they?

First, let’s take a step back and look at the use of videos online.

This post is part of our Blueprints 4.0 for a Healthier Dive Industry Business Model series by the Business of Diving Institute and Darcy Kieran, author of:

The Role of Online Videos

There are plenty of free videos online. We all know YouTube! And there are plenty of videos for which we have to pay something, somehow, to access them. We all know Netflix!

Where do scuba diving training videos fit on that spectrum from free to overpriced?

To answer this question, let’s look at the purpose of the video.

When HBO spends millions of dollars to create a series of videos assembled under an umbrella called “Game of Thrones,” the video is the end product. Therefore, they have to collect money from the viewers. An alternative way to make such a product profitable is by selling ads as we see on regular broadcast TV.

Neither of these scenarios applies to dive training videos. Watching such a video is not the end-game, and the video doesn’t have mass entertainment appeal. In fact, the scuba training video is simply a tiny first step toward the real goal: exploring the underwater world.

At the other end of the spectrum, there are free online videos. Let’s forget about YouTube because Google is too strange of a beast! Let’s look at brand-produced videos.

GoPro regularly posts high-quality videos online–free. GoPro is not in the business of selling us training sessions on how to use our GoPro camera. And the entertainment value of the GoPro adventure videos is there to make us want to buy a GoPro. They do not expect us to pay for the privilege of watching these thrilling videos, no matter how exciting they are.

Look at this story of a fireman saving a kitten. It got more than 44 million views!

Let’s put this topic of free online video aside for a second and look at free online courses.

The Role of Free Online Courses

Everybody and their mother-in-law can produce online courses nowadays. There are plenty of accessible, inexpensive platforms to use.

Let’s have a look at Teachable, for instance. Under their free plan, you can have unlimited students and unlimited courses. Their most expensive, business-level plan costs $199 per month. A few years back, setting yourself up to provide online courses was a costly and challenging project. But that’s ancient history!

On most of the online teaching platforms, you will find people and organizations offering free courses. Why would anybody offer a course, online, for free?

Udemy (another online course platform) summarizes quite well the answer to that question. You should consider offering free online courses if:

Your goal is lead generation, and you have a strategy to convert those leads profitably.
You are looking to attract new customers for your revenue-generating products or services.

What? Wait! Isn’t that your goal if you operate a dive center? You want to get more people jumping in the pool to learn how to breathe underwater. You want more people on your dive charter boat. And you want to fill more rooms at your dive resort.

The same could be said of all other dive industry stakeholders, with only one exception: dive training agencies. The goal for the rest of us is to get people underwater, not to have them watch videos and read stuff online.

And since there are no training agencies currently interested in issuing C-cards for tankless diving, courses are offered free online by the manufacturers of surface-supplied air (tankless) diving systems.

There’s only one reason why the theory part of learning to dive is not free online: the shareholders of dive training agencies. And they are keeping us all in the past.

The Role of eLearning in The Dive Industry

Let’s forget about dive training agencies for a minute. Instead, let’s assume we are running a business that encompasses the entire dive industry.

It’s a 17 billion dollar business. Most of our revenues (about 75%) come from dive travel and dive outings. A little bit comes from selling gear. And some, from teaching scuba diving. We are really in the business of scuba diving – the activity of being underwater! We are in the experience economy. We are not in the “teaching” business.

Such a business fits the description of one that would benefit from offering free online learning to attract more people to its services.

But What If I Am A Dive Instructor?

Good question! Let’s say I am a dive instructor, and PADI sends me part of the eLearning fees my students paid on the PADI website. I like getting that money!

Right! But here’s the real question: how profitable is it for me to teach scuba diving?

As we have seen in a recent study on the economics of being a dive instructor, it would be hard to plan retirement on a dive instructor’s income. Yet, the private equity firm that owns the training agency I am affiliated with is making a killing on eLearning fees. Shouldn’t I care more about my own survival than that of a billionaire trying to make another billion?

Let’s flip this around. Imagine if I could keep 100% of the eLearning fee because there is no eLearning fee! If my student-divers were to pay the same amount they currently pay (including the training agency eLearning fee) but pay it all to me, that would be enough to make my teaching operations much more profitable.

And on top of that increased profitability, I would be likely to get more student-divers.

The free GoPro video on diving with manta rays in Hawaii has more than one million views. Meanwhile, the PADI Learn To Dive video has less than 100 thousand views. Promoting PADI is not the best way to grow the dive industry. Promoting “the underwater world” with brands like GoPro, is.

But Who Would Pay for Developing and Producing the Online Courses?

Obviously, we can’t ask training agencies to offer their services for free. They are private businesses that are expected to generate profits.

The real problem is that training agencies have grabbed the training part of our dive industry operations and forced everybody else to stay out of offering training.

Of course, there is a cost to producing quality videos and text to teach scuba diving, but it ain’t rocket science. And it is not something that changes and needs to be updated every few months. We are not teaching an ever-evolving programming language for artificial intelligence, for instance!

Let’s look at the example of an underwater breathing activity that has remained outside of traditional dive training agencies: surface-supplied air (tankless) diving. Blu3 is a brand of electric-powered tankless diving systems. None of the major dive training agencies have developed a course for these systems yet. So, what? Well… Training is free! Blu3 can offer free online courses because they are in the business of selling dive equipment and encouraging people to go underwater.

In that sense, the cost of online scuba diving training should be similar to that of a TV commercial. It is a justifiable and worthwhile cost.

What Now?

Step one is discussing the fact that our current dive industry business models are not the best in today’s world. I hope this article will contribute to this goal.

Then, how could we make it happen? There is not much that can be done by current dive centers and instructors because they are very small businesses next to elephants like PADI. But as consolidation happens, maybe, one day, a vertically integrated player may see the benefit of free online scuba diving training.

An alternative route could be the acquisition of a small dive training agency by a group of dive centers, dive resorts, dive travel agencies, and dive gear manufacturers. That way, the cost of producing these online training programs would be shared among numerous benefiting parties.

Continue reading about Blueprints 4.0 for a Healthier Dive Industry Business Model.