National Maritime College of Ireland

CBT Courses Go Fully Online

For the first time, shipmanagers can order all of Seagull’s training modules as online computer based training (CBT) courses saving time and money for crew tuition. CBT enables seafarers to undertake training either on board ships or in their homes during shore leave instead of travelling to management offices or academies, says Seagull  managing director Roger Ringstad.

“All our CBT can be run online for the first  time” he explains. “We started in 2005 to convert our CBTs and we finished this in February 2011. Now 100 per cent of our modules can be run online.” Seagull provides online CBT to Unicom in Cyprus and Teekay Corp. Mr Ringstad expects others to follow: “We will have 10 more customers by the end of this year using online CBT on board their ships, and for office staff like superintendents and technicians.

“We have been running trials with various owners, running OBT online from their ships. We run e-learning content locally from onboard workstations.”

Bandwidth limitations means Seagull still needs to burn CBT courses to CDs and send them to ships. “If all of our customers went online, then we could do this very swiftly” he adds. “But we still have problems with sending just 100kb files to some ship operators.

Seagull has recently developed a CBT module for teaching tanker operators about volatile organic compounds (VOC) emissions reduction technology. This technology is already employed on North Sea shuttle tankers.

“We developed a course for tanker operators to explain the regulations and show how to operate VOC equipment. There are some different technology solutions. Teekay has one solution and Knutsen has a different technology. Shuttle tankers collect VOCs in the North Sea in accordance with Norwegian regulations. We expect this will go international as in the future Marpol Annex VI will introduce similar requirements.”

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