MarTID: The Global Maritime Training Survey
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© taa22/Adobe Stock
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Murray Goldberg, CEO of Marine Learning Systems
In a coming edition of Maritime Reporter & Engineering News, we explore modern training and “blended learning” techniques with Murray Goldberg, CEO of Marine Learning Systems, maker of MarineLMS. A researcher and developer of learning management systems, Goldberg’s software has been used by millions of people and companies worldwide. Here Goldberg explains the scope and important of a historic new annual survey, The Maritime Training and Insights Database (MarTID) (www.martid.org/survey).
Q: Our parent organization, New Wave Media, your organization, and in conjunction with the World Maritime University, earlier this year signed an MOU to create a survey of global maritime training habits and practices, The Maritime Training and Insights Database (MarTID). Please give a brief synopsis of MarTID and its importance to the industry.
Goldberg: I’m very excited about The Maritime Training and Insights Database (MarTID). So, what’s it about? It’s about understanding how vessel operators, training centers, flag states, really anyone or entity in the maritime industry, trains.
What do they consider best practice?
What efforts and resources do they put in?
What results are they getting?
When I was a faculty member involved in higher education and understanding educational technologies, there was a beautiful annual survey, resulting in an annual report which talked about educational practices at universities.
Eevery year, this highly anticipated report would come out which showed: how people are employing technologies, what results were they getting, how much are they spending –all these kinds of information that universities could use to benchmark their own practices around teaching. It was a valuable resource to universities.
Now being in the maritime industry, I felt as though there was a bit of an information vacuum: vessel operators know what they are doing; they might know what one or two others are doing; but nobody knows what the industry as a whole is doing and how practices vary.
We want to make sure that the entire industry can benefit from the great work being done at individual vessel operators’, individual training centers, and so on. So that’s really what this is about. This is about shining a light on and exposing the best – and even the worst – of current practices so that all can learn and improve.
Q: As you know it was a struggle making the survey a digestible size. If you had one message to the primary targets of this survey – vessel owner/operators – a message which conveyed why it is in their interest to take the 20 to 25 minutes to fill out the survey, what would that advice be?
Goldberg: The bottom line is we can’t do this without you. It’s a little bit hard for people to understand the benefit to their organization until they actually see these reports. But once they do see, they can better understand how amazing (the reports) are and how they can help them in terms of their personal operations and fine tuning their own training practices. I know once they start to see these reports coming out – and they will come out on an annual basis – that they will get and they will contribute. And by the way, that’s exactly how it went in higher education. The first couple years were good but a bit slower. But then it just grew in terms of importance and people were eager to fill it out every year. So help us get started. Let’s get that information out there and then we will grow this database year over year to the benefit of all.
The MarTID Survey is open until January 31, 2018. Please take the survey @ www.martid.org/survey
MarTID founders:
• World Maritime University -- https://www.wmu.se/
• Marine Learning Systems -- https://www.marinels.com/
• New Wave Media -- https://www.marinelink.com
