When it launched in Fall 2019, with hundreds of students enrolled in its one-of-a-kind training program, there was no thought that the RV Technical Institute would soon have to react to a significant national health crisis. But in March 2020, the coronavirus began to sweep across the country, forcing major institutions, including educational establishments, to respond to students’ needs while observing safety and health guidelines.
In record time, the RVTI seized the challenge and went to work migrating its wildly popular Level One training course to an online setting. As a result of its efforts, the Level One course started accepting students on April 20, allowing RV technicians to continue training for the only industry-wide certification.
As experts on RV standards and how RVs are built, inspectors Kyle Van Tassel, Oliver Keultjes, and Nick Holobaugh offered their professional opinions on the online course.
“I thought it was a good review, and I also learned a lot,” said Keultjes. “It went through the systems of a normal RV and taught an entry-level technician how to go about fixing, troubleshooting, and identifying things.”
For Holobaugh, the newest inspector among the three, it was reassuring to go over the things he’d been taught. “It was a nice tie-in to all the codes and standards that go along with this. I thought it gave a good overview of the propane and the electrical, the different systems that are in an RV, like appliances. It covered the information that you would need to do a pre-delivery inspection.”
Van Tassel also praised the useful, necessary information. “It’s a good outline of testing procedures and things you need to look at, specifically for inspections in your section. Super basic troubleshooting is good information for anybody to have, and it applies to many different scenarios. The testing procedures are essential for every aspect of the industry. On the production line, we witness a lot of tests and they may be reset afterward to make sure that they didn’t miss anything. As inspectors, those are the things we focus on. I think it’s good that they focus on that in the course as well.”
For more information on the RVTI, click here or email RVTI-info@rvti.org.