Skill Badges as Activity Prerequisites SD313/414
Some benefits to using skill badges as prerequisites for activities include:
--Lessening bureaucracy and improving course administration. For example, Basic Climbing Admins would be able to track student progress online, rather than manually in booklets, and it can ensure that Basic Climbing students cannot register for glacier climbs until they've successfully completed glacier skills training.
--Allowing course leaders to specify leader prerequisites for skills conditioners, allowing people to grow into leadership, broadening the leadership funnel.
--Encouraging leaders who are reluctant to take students they don’t know on climbs to open them up, because they will be able to see more clearly what types of experiences students have.
--Making tracking and program cross-pollination easier.
--Increasing entry points to our organization.
--Helping leaders have increased confidence in the skills of their participants.
Jeff Bowman
shared this idea
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David Bradley
commented
This would benefit programs in addition to Climbing too. For example, in Showshoe both Basic and Backcountry *students* can sign up for some kinds of trips provided they have attended the lecture and the field trip. However, this puts a burden on the Trip Leaders to manually verify the prerequisites for every student who signs up for their trips. And because some branches to not post their lectures and field trip on the website (e.g. Tacoma, Foothills) Trip Leaders must email the current year's instructors and ask them to manually verify that students have attended course + lecture. This is an incredibly tedious process for snowshoe trip leaders (especially, as mentioned, when the student is from a branch that doesn't use the website) and is a deterrent to posting and leading showshoe trips. If skill badges were awarded after field trips, then then the website could do the verification for us (assuming that all branches started using them and enforcing them consistently, of course.