Online and Remote Training Experience in the Engine Room Simulator Training Courses using the IMO Model Course 2.07 Exercises

In the age of technology, changes are experienced in many areas such as globalization, information society, new basic technology, the spread of the Internet, and the realization of competition on a global scale. New methods used in education and training have been developed and kept up with technological developments. With the widespread use of the Internet, online and remote training has become more possible than ever. Technology was ready for online education and training for the past decades, yet the COVID-19 pandemic caused the traditional training to be disrupted and training institutions had to carry out studies for traditional training to be conducted online and remotely. This caused a paradigm change in the training methods. Online or remote education, even in training using the engine room simulator (ERS), has become more popular as an alternative to traditional classroom teachings, even though the pandemic is disappearing. Additionally, the progress in autonomous ships and recent regulatory studies indicates the importance of a better understanding of the engineering data in remote or autonomous ship operations. The authors have been offering Engine Room Simulator (ERS) training courses using online methods since the first semester of 2020, totaling six semesters of online training so far. This paper presents the online training process used in courses including the technological setup and method of teaching and assessment. Experiences and lessons learned by the lecturers in providing operational and management level ERS courses and feedback from students are examined and presented. The use of IMO Model Course 2017 Edition became helpful as it describes exercises for each training objective in accordance with IMO STCW 2010. An Engine Room Simulator (ERS) called Ship ERS or SERS™ was utilized as the remote training tool in the pilot implementation of these courses that were spread over two semesters. The advantages and disadvantages of online ERS training was presented and discussed. A particular and interesting observation has been that the students could have longer duration of exercise opportunities when using SERS™ in the remote training than in traditional ones.