This is the second post in a series of posts about pending legislation involving Licensed Home Inspectors in Washington State, that should be of interest to all parties involved in the sale of real estate in the State. The first post dealt with Senate Bill 5644 regarding mold.
This post will talk about a second provision of Senate Bill 5644 which would require the Fundamentals of Home Inspection training course to be available both as an on-line course and as live instruction. 
Currently the Fundamentals of Home Inspection course can only be taught in a classroom setting with live instruction.
As an educator I can testify to the difficulties inherent in attempting to teach a “fundamentals” courses on-line. While it may be possible to justify on-line training for some professions, the job we must do as home inspectors is a very visual and tactile profession that often requires all of the senses in making the best evaluations of properties being inspected.
The reasons being given for allowing this course on-line is due to supposed hardships for people in remote areas of the state to travel to get the training. While it may be unfortunate that there may be additional costs for some to travel to get training, this would not likely be any different than it would be to get professional training for many other professions.
Being a newly licensed profession, the free market place also has not had time to create services where needed around the state---it likely will in the future if deemed economically practical.
Given that the number of hours of training to become a home inspector is so MINIMAL as it now stands, it does not make any sense to me to dumb it down any further. In the future, when the number of hours of training are equivalent to a 2 or 4 year degree it will be highly likely that at least some of those hours will be able to be adequately accomplished on-line. Until that day comes it is important to not mess with the “minimum standard” we are currently at.
The Fundamentals of Home Inspection course at Bellingham Technical College, which I teach part of, has had many students that have traveled across the state to take our course and they all, when polled, agree that it would not be possible to do what we do in terms of training on-line.
Another thing to consider is that if current education providers were required to do both methods of instructions we might just loose some of those providers of education completely---thus reducing the currently few options that exist for training.
Perhaps it is time to allow doctors to do their residency on-line.
If you click on this paragraph you will find the bill and its current status. You will also find links to the sponsors where you can email them directly about this bill. You can also find links to your own legislators that you can email as well. Please take a moment to give them your opinion on this matter.
Other Important Bills:
Senate Bill 6433
Senate Bill 6434
Charles Buell
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While I realize that technology has expanded to the on-line classroom setting, nothing compares to the live hands on training for an industry like yours.
As an example, sure you can watch a tutorial on parachuting. But until you actually jump out of that plane, all you have is book knowledge....Good luck ith that!