I won't bore you with our design and development process, but it's based on sound adult learning principles. There's self-testing and testing that occurs throughout the modules. All the courses are broken up into modules. Every course has an exam. At a minimum you know that person got 85% on that exam, or it is pass-fail. There are various grading methodologies.
But that doesn't mean that they still understand things six months or 12 months out. That's the research we talked about earlier. We've had two chunks of research done to make sure that longitudinal retention was still there.
You come back to learning styles. In the classroom it's the same thing. How do you know that people understood that in a classroom six months out and 12 months out? It's part of what we have to get better at, in terms of skills retention and skills perishability. People qualify on firearms every year or two years. Should it be every six months or every 18 months? We don't know. It's just arbitrary. That's the way we've done it; that's the way we do it.
But I think we have to get better at that sort of thing. We're vigilant about it now. We don't just think that it happens. Also there's an onus of responsibility on police officers. When they take a course and they pass that course, now it's assumed that they have that skill or knowledge to go out and do their job. If something happens in an inquiry, the first question is, “Were you trained? What was the course training standard? How long ago was it?” It's a big part of what we do.