Without compromising on its long-standing reputation for quality, Maritime Academy adapted quickly to the COVID-19 crisis to offer live “virtual classroom” training to its customers from March. This new means of learning will remain part of its learning solutions for the foreseeable future.
With travel and other restrictions in place worldwide since February 2020, DNV GL’s Maritime Academies across the globe worked intensely to find a solution that would allow them to continue to offer quality training online and satisfy the demands of customers working remotely from their workplace or home office.
The first courses were up and running by beginning of March thanks to the high engagement to embrace this new way of delivering training. As a result, Maritime Academy was rewarded with very positive feedback from the course attendees right from the start.
One participant remarked “The course lasted two full days but thanks to the excellent preparation by the trainer, frequent short breaks and use of the polls feature, the high motivation and concentration levels of the attendees could be maintained throughout.“
Prior to course delivery, all the involved trainers attended preparation sessions to ensure smooth delivery of the courses using the new online tools. Maritime Academy was determined to ensure that the online “virtual classroom” solution held all the same benefits as the former physical classroom, the most important being a confident and experienced instructor to deliver the training in real-time and answer questions from the participants. It has been possible to deliver most training courses in this way and even develop some new course titles, responding directly to new needs as the crisis continues. Look out for the following titles offered as online courses:
Alternative Shipboard Internal Audits in times of COVID-19
Technical Management & Surveys in times of COVID-19
Maritime Infection Prevention and Control
An undeniable advantage of offering courses “virtually” is of course the economies that can be made, both in terms of time and expense traveling to and from a course venue. This means that the virtual classroom will become a valuable addition to Maritime Academy’s training offer in the longer term even after the COVID-19 crisis period has ended. The availability of highly technical courses requiring specialist trainers for example, will certainly benefit if they can be run as virtual classroom courses since the minimum number of course participants can be achieved more easily when the geographical location is no longer an issue.
Look out for more live online training opportunities from your local Academies in the weeks to come and seize the opportunity to keep on learning.