The National RV Training Academy (NRVTA) has restructured its RV technical training classes taught at the Big Red School House.
When Texas Gov. Greg Abbott issued an executive order this month and the Henderson County Commissioners Court followed by declaring a public health emergency regarding the COVID-19 pandemic, the declaration limited gatherings to no more than 10 people and all schools in the state were temporarily closed.
“On the surface, these restrictions in response to the COVID-19 virus were going to be paralyzing to the academy and its upcoming classes,” said Terry Cooper, NRVTA president. “However, many times adversity creates new opportunities that we might never attempt if we were not pushed to seek other methods.”
By the time restrictions were announced, the academy had already sold out registrations for scheduled classes. However, many students could no longer get out of their communities to attend training, nor could the academy offer classes under the government’s orders.
Evada Cooper, the author of RV Centennial Cookbook, as well as one of the owners of the Texan RV Park and NRVTA, went into cooking mode. “If you are working on a recipe and are missing some ingredients, then you have to become creative in substituting some of the missing items,” she said.
She noted NRVTA had an inventory of:
- Sold-out technical classes
- Instructors that needed and wanted to train people
- An existing training curriculum called the Home Study Program which had already been recorded and placed on flash drives or could be downloaded to any computer or cell phone
- Printed books and handouts
- A fiber-optic, high-speed internet connection
- Video cameras that can stream material into a classroom or onto the internet.
The NRVTA team has come up with a hybrid plan to take content found in the home-study version of the NRVTA Basic RV Maintenance Program and schedule a series of live video feeds. That way an instructor can deliver training and answer questions students may have pertaining to the material or prescribed assignments.
The home-study option involves viewing prerecorded modules that run eight to 15 minutes in length and utilizing the same books or handouts used in live classes.
The online lectures are reinforced by having an instructor capture on-the-job examples of testing and repair procedures conducted in one of the academy’s three service bays or at the adjacent Texan RV Park.
Students who participate in the hybrid course will have the opportunity to attend a live version of the same class at NRVTA within a year at no additional cost.
If the emergency declarations remain in place for an extended period of time, then the same hybrid-class format will be developed for the NRVTA Advanced RV Inspector Level II course as well as for each of the four advanced technical classes pertaining to air conditioners, RV absorption refrigerators, water heaters/furnaces and exterior systems, like slide-outs, leveling systems, roofs and running gear.
