Ep 128: What's New in ASIM QuickStart
Episode 128
Published Jun 2, 2026
Duration: 08:13
Episode Summary
In this episode, we introduce ASIM QuickStart, a free online course that gives every responder the foundation they need to act with confidence the moment they arrive at an active shooter event. Bill Godfrey and Kevin Nichols explain how 12 short, self-paced video modules can, in less than an hour, get an entire agency, and the surrounding agencies that respond alongside them, working from one shared playbook before an incident ever happens. Built on the national-standard ASIM Checklist and free to everyone, it turns "we've never trained together" into "we already know our roles."
Episode Notes
After training more than 32,000 responders in over 2,700 active shooter exercises, we've learned what separates a coordinated response from a chaotic one: whether law enforcement, fire, EMS, and dispatch have ever operated from the same playbook. ASIM QuickStart was built to put that playbook in every responder's hands, for free.
In this episode of the Active Shooter Incident Management Podcast, Bill Godfrey and Kevin Nichols introduce ASIM QuickStart, a free online course that delivers the foundational concepts of active shooter incident management in 12 short video modules, in less than an hour. It covers how an incident actually unfolds, the key roles and terminology, and how responders move from first contact to organized rescue and transport, all built on the national-standard ASIM Checklist.
Because it's free, self-paced, and available on any device, an entire agency can complete it without pulling people off the street or paying to backfill shifts, and you can push it out to the mutual-aid partners who would respond alongside you. When everyone arrives already speaking the same language, you spend the first critical minutes acting instead of figuring out who does what.
There's no registration wall to start, responders can watch the modules in any order, and you can earn a certificate of completion for training hours if you choose. For agencies rolling it out at scale, a free tracking tool lets a training officer see exactly who has and hasn't finished.
Start the free ASIM QuickStart course at: https://ncier.org/asim/quickstart
Watch this episode on YouTube at: https://youtu.be/e9DlLZsOxug
Transcript
Bill Godfrey:So first up, let's talk about ASIM QuickStart, brand new course. We've never offered a course like this or built one like this. And it's free.
Kevin Nichols:
Absolutely 100% free. It's online, so you can access it just about anywhere. Anywhere you have access to a computer or a phone and it's self-paced, you can run at your own pace. It's a total of 12 individual videos, individual modules. That total time committed is about 41 minutes.
Bill Godfrey:
I'm so happy with how that package came out. You know, we had a number of goals that we wanted to hit with that. Number one, we wanted it in bite-size pieces, so there's no video on there that's longer than three, four minutes max. There are short bite-sized pieces. You can do one at a time, you can do a couple. It doesn't really matter. When you've got a few moments, you watch one, you're good to go. There is a super short post test that goes with each one of the video modules. So you watch your three or four minute video, and then you've got a two, three question test just to highlight that you've gotten the context of the thing. But the thing that I really like is you don't have to watch the videos in order.
Kevin Nichols:
No, you don't. You could go in and if something interests you, you can pick it up. If you miss something, you can skip it and go back. Also, at the end of the class, you'll end up with that training certificate that you can turn in and get credit for the hour spent.
Bill Godfrey:
Yeah, it's so easy to do. The adoption has been kind of going crazy. So here's what happened with the curriculum change and what caused us to create the QuickStart class. Very simply, it was from the feedback. Kevin, we talked about what ASIM Quickstart is, and now let's talk for a moment about why, not why we changed it, but why we created it. We took a look at the participant evaluations. You know, every class delivery we do, we ask people to fill out participant evaluation. Pretty standard thing. And one of the most valuable pieces of feedback items are actually the write in answers, not the check boxes, but the ones where people have to actually write something in. And we looked at the tens of thousands of evaluations that we had, and there's two questions that I love. One of them is, what was the most valuable? And then the other one was the least valuable. And so when we ask people who were participating in the ASIM Basic course, what was the most valuable? Now this is a course where it's a four hour course, two hours of it was lecture, two hours of it was hands-on. When we asked people what was the most valuable,
Kevin Nichols:
They said that the time spent actually doing the scenarios, the hands-on, on the Counterstrike kits, doing the scenarios, working through the process was the most valuable.
Bill Godfrey:
And the least valuable.
Kevin Nichols:
The least valuable was the lecture, the time spent in lecture in the classroom.
Bill Godfrey:
And that was notable and triggered a lot of internal conversation for us because what we realized, it wasn't people saying that they didn't get any value from the lecture, but as they were spending their time, they found the scenarios to be way more valuable. And we said, all right, how do we give them more of that value, which led us to kind of take a look at face-to-face training. The truth of matter is face-to-face training in a classroom, pretty expensive.
Kevin Nichols:
It is. You think about it, you've got the guy that's in the classroom, we're having to pay his salary, pay his time. He's not able to do his primary job, whether that's police, fire, EMS on the street or, or whatever. And we're having to pay someone to cover his position. So you're really having to pay twice for this one person to be in training.
Bill Godfrey:
Yeah. Or you're pulling people off of the road, out of operations to put 'em in training. You're letting your manpower drop down a little bit. Either way you do it, however you skin that cat, putting people in the classroom for training is expensive. And we asked the hard question, do we really need to do lecture in this expensive environment or is there another way we can do it that's equally or more effective?
Kevin Nichols:
Is there a better way to get that information across at a time where we don't have to tie them into a classroom and pull them away from their job?
Bill Godfrey:
Absolutely. And so in the case of ASIM QuickStart, the Active Shooter Incident Management QuickStart, we took the content from the ASIM Basic lecture. So we took the two hours of ASIM Basic lecture, we cut out everything that didn't need to be there. We focused the message, shortened it up, got it broken into 12 ideas, 12 modules that tied together and made that a short sound bite.
Kevin Nichols:
So we made it into the 12 modules and we made each module individual. So I can run through each module at my own pace, at my own timing and each module is broken down to where it can be watched individually and I can skip to the next one. I can skip modules and come back. All of that's available to you on the QuickStart program.
Bill Godfrey:
And of course, it's free. It's available online. It's easy and quick to consume. There's, it's not hidden behind a wall where you have to register before you know what you're doing. The videos are right there. You don't have to sign up for anything. In fact, if you don't want a certificate, you don't have to sign up at all. You can go consume the content. But of course, if you want the certificate, then you do have to, after you watch the video, you need to sign in, do the pre-test, and then there's a post-test that goes with each module. And I've been pretty surprised at the incredible uptake that we're seeing. The numbers really caught me off guard.
Kevin Nichols:
Well, we kind of modeled it to take the place or, to front load some of the lecture on the ASIM Basic course, but it can also be used for an awareness level training. At the end of the day, your whole agency can go through QuickStart at no cost to your agency. You can get everybody in your agency on board, but you can also help push it out to your surrounding responding agencies, the agencies that are gonna come help you if you have this type of incident at your place.
Bill Godfrey:
And this is the foundational material about the active shooter incident management process, the key concepts, the terminology, how it unfolds, how it works. And you can get everybody in your agency, in your community, in your region, on the same page for free at their own pace, desktop, tablet, phone.
Kevin Nichols:
So this allows you to be able to access this information at your own pace, at your own time, whether you're, you know, between calls at work, whether you're, you know, at the office. And being able to consume that at your own time and own pace, I think is incredibly helpful.
Bill Godfrey:
The other thing that we did, recognizing there are organizations that are interested in adopting this across their agency or across their region, is we said we need a way for a training officer to see who has and hasn't completed it. And so we created that. And that also is available for free.
Kevin Nichols:
Yeah, absolutely free of charge allows you to track who in your agency's done it and what their progress is along the way.
Bill Godfrey:
I'm very, very excited to see how quickly - we did a soft rollout and then we did a launch. And even after the initial launch and the marketing stopped, the numbers kept growing with a nearly exponential growth, which means it picked up a lot of word of mouth very quickly.
Kevin Nichols:
Yeah. It's an easy program to absorb. It's easy to understand and it's really, like I said, very helpful to your agency to get everybody on the same page of music before something bad happens in your place.
Bill Godfrey:
That's ASIM QuickStart brand new course online, available for free, 42 minutes of content. You literally can complete the whole thing under an hour. You get a certificate. What's not to do it, right? You know why would you not do it?
Kevin Nichols:
It's an easy day and an easy way to get yourself, get yourself and your agency spun up and on the same page.