Online Learning on AIARE Courses
The online content and website we are developing is designed to be a flexible resource to help you continue to run courses next year. The idea is, at its most basic level, you could use the website coupled with virtual instruction to replace typical in-person classroom sessions. The organization of the website also supports Instructors and Providers who want to use a learning management system such as Google Classroom to track student progress, quiz students, and provide your own content. You are not required to use the website for your instruction, but all Providers should make it available to their students.
The online learning content will continue to be hosted at http://aiareonline.org and will retain the same look and feel as it has currently. We created this outline to provide an overview of the pages and their organization on the website. We will keep you updated and continue to provide you with the ability to preview the site as we continue to build it out.
What you will need to do to prepare for the 2020-21 season
As always, AIARE provides curriculum and content to support you delivering high quality avalanche courses. The success of these courses depends on you, the Providers and Instructors (otherwise everything would just be online and no one would need a teacher!). As always, you need to take our curriculum and content and create agendas and an instructional plan that works for the specifics of your venue, staff, and risk management plan.
Unless you are making no changes to your courses next year, you will need to adapt your classroom sessions to some form of an online learning environment. We don’t recommend simply holding your classroom sessions as you normally would but via a video conference. If you haven’t experienced 8 hours on Zoom yet, take it from our experience that it is soul crushing.
Keeping it simple, you could use the website for 4(ish) hours of student self-paced learning coupled with 4(ish) hours of video conference classroom instruction. But we also organized the website so that you could also used with your own online learning curriculum you have developed or as a supplement to a more “typical” classroom session that might be held virtually over 4 or 5 sessions, or holding some “classroom” sessions outdoors.
This webpage provides a sample agenda outline for a hybrid (self-paced, virtual classroom, and field instruction) AIARE 1 course. The AIARE 2 sample can be found here. We will continue to update these pages with ideas and content over the course of the summer.
Whatever you end up doing, there will be additional planning time required this year to refine agendas and prepare your instructional sessions that will happen via Zoom. We are planning several webinars to help out with using Zoom, Google Classroom, presenting online, and facilitate sharing of ideas among Providers and Instructors for operations during a global pandemic.
What constitutes an AIARE Course?
While there are hours guidelines provided by both A3 and AIARE (24 hour courses with 60% of those hours in the field), they are meant to give you an idea of the scope and design of the course. The hours should not drive the goals of the course; this is the role of the learning outcomes. The goal of the AIARE 1 is for students to be able to use The AIARE Framework to manage their risk in avalanche terrain and continue their learning. The goal of an AIARE 2 is for a student to be able to assess uncertainty and use The AIARE Framework to address uncertainty and create an appropriate plan in response.
Keep this guidance and the goal in mind when designing a learning experience (in person or online) for your students next season.
We know there is a lot going on and a lot of information, variables, and uncertainty to manage. Please don’t hesitate to reach out to Liz via email or phone (206-375-3926) if you have any questions. We are here to support your success next season.