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With the other videos suggested, there are a lot of free YouTube stuff we can share, but a lot of it is outdated and incomplete or simply there to primarily promote a certain kitesurfing brand.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