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Kiteboarding Australia - Online Learning Tool to help you become an independent kiteboarder!

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Created by GMkal > 9 months ago, 2 Nov 2017
GMkal
NSW, 72 posts
2 Nov 2017 1:13PM
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Hey Newbies,

Hope you are well and starting to get some sessions on the water as we ramp up into summer.

Kiteboarding Australia is excited to release a project that has been worked on in recent months to help beginners and newbies into our sport in an even more factual and safe way.

www.openlearning.com/kiteboarding-australia/

Taking the step from completing lessons with a personal instructor to going down to the beach by yourself can sometimes be a little bit daunting. We have created an online tool that is designed to help you learn while you are at home waiting for the wind to arrive. The course is free and may take a couple of hours to complete. Please note, the course is not designed to be a one stop shop on how to kite. It is a tool to compliment physical lessons that are 100% needed when learning this awesome sport.

The course has just been released from test mode so please bear with us if there are any glitches, but please do provide feedback if you have ideas on how we can improve. contact@kiteboardingaus.com is a great place to get in contact.

It's here to help the kiteboarding community and those who interact with kiteboarders to create awareness about water and kiteboarding safety.

We hope that it helps you learn, so please share with your friends and beyond.


Declan McCarthy

Kiteboarding Australia

KiteBud
WA, 1515 posts
3 Nov 2017 9:02AM
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Hi Declan and the team at KA,

This is awesome and a great effort to help improve the quality of training for students across the country.

Online training is the future of the sport and definitely helps setting and maintaining minimum quality standards for teaching.

The thing I like the most about this course is that the students have the ability to interact Online and share their knowledge and experiences.

This will probably surprise many but my feedback is that this course is too in depth. While developing the Kitebud tutorials I constantly needed to remind myself what do the students really ''NEED to know'' vs. what is ''NICE to know''.

A lot of the information in there is simply a copy/paste from the instructor manual. There is a need to dissociate instructor training vs student training. For example, with the weather, students really only NEED to know that storm fronts are dangerous for kitesurfing as they bring unpredictable winds and potentially very strong gusts. The rest is ''nice to know'' as students don't need to become weather experts.

While retraining hundreds of students over the years it became obvious what the main ''Need to knows'' were as the students weaknesses in knowledge and skills are almost always the same. This is explained in my KiteBud blog post called ''how good were your lessons''.

For example, the majority of students coming out of lessons don't know how to assess the wind strength based on observations around them and choose appropriate kite sizes, which is a major safety concern and much more important than knowing the names of the clouds.

As far as skills goes, most students aren't capable of doing a self-rescue as they were never asked to practice it in deep water in windy conditions. The video you suggest in the course demonstrates this skill in what looks to be less than 5 knots i.e. when no one would be kitesurfing.

With the other videos suggested, there are a lot of free YouTube stuff we can share, but a lot of it is outdated and incomplete or simply there to primarily promote a certain kitesurfing brand.

As I suggested before, it would be great for KA to produce their own tutorials and I would be more than happy to help with this project.

Christian

GMkal
NSW, 72 posts
20 Nov 2017 9:15PM
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Hey Christian, thanks for the feedback.

I certainly agree with you regarding the 'nice to know' and 'need to know' concept, having a lesson that is concise with relevant and essential information (particularly around safety and safe practices) is an essential to becoming an independent kiter.

The course is designed to be a complimentary course to a physical lesson and does indeed consist of information that is designed to further the knowledge of the student. So for all the people learning to kite and using this course, the safety points that you learn in your physical lessons are certainly the key takeaways to keep at the front of mind when kiting.

Cheers,
Declan



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"Kiteboarding Australia - Online Learning Tool to help you become an independent kiteboarder!" started by GMkal