Ep 129: What's New in ASIM Basic
Episode 129
Published Jun 3, 2026
Duration: 11:03
Episode Summary
In this episode, we walk through the updated Active Shooter Incident Management (ASIM) Basic and how it helps you build and sustain readiness inside your own agency. Bill Godfrey and Kevin Nichols explain how moving the majority of lecture into the free ASIM QuickStart course makes room for more hands-on scenarios in class, why the three scenarios are now scripted so every class runs to the same standard nationwide, and how the rebuilt one-day train-the-trainer qualifies up to twenty of your own trainers at once, double the previous number. They also cover the free update that recertifies current trainers for another three years.
Episode Notes
The most valuable part of Active Shooter Incident Management (ASIM) Basic has always been the hands-on scenarios, so the updated course is built to give you more of them. With most of the lecture now carried by the free ASIM QuickStart course, which is a prerequisite, students arrive already sharing the fundamentals, and class time focuses on running the process.
In this episode of the Active Shooter Incident Management Podcast, Bill Godfrey and Kevin Nichols walk through what changed. After a short opening that hits the high points and goes a little deeper on a few topics, the class moves into three prescribed scenarios, up from two, with time for a fourth. Those scenarios are now scripted in the trainer manual, so every class, in any state, runs the same standard and objectives. The thinking is simple: consistency is what produces quality.
For agencies that want to sustain training in-house, the ASIM Basic Train-the-Trainer has been rebuilt. Because the foundation is front-loaded and the scenarios are scripted, it is now a single eight-hour day instead of two, and it qualifies up to twenty trainers at once, double the previous number, with everything they need to start teaching the next day. The course package is now a browser-based download that runs on Windows, Mac, or Linux and includes the participant guide, trainer guide, and course design document for CEU and POST submissions. And every current trainer can take a free update, eleven short modules in about an hour and fifteen minutes, that recertifies their credential for another three years.
Learn more about the updated ASIM Basic at: https://ncier.org/asim/basic?utm_source=yt
View this episode on YouTube at: https://youtu.be/b33b6KEZjas
Transcript
Bill Godfrey:Now let's shift gears and talk about ASIM Basic. 'cause. Oh boy, we made a lot of changes to ASIM Basic.
Kevin Nichols:
We did not the least of which was we reduced that two and a half hour, or two to two and a half hours of lecture you talked about and front loaded that into the QuickStart program. One of the first things you'll notice now is taking that Basic class, we have the QuickStart program as a prerequisite.
Bill Godfrey:
And that's an interesting thing that our trainers out there who are already teaching ASIM Basic, we just released the trainer update here. And so they're all going through that process right now. QuickStart is a prerequisite, a mandatory prerequisite to ASIM Basic. Why?
Kevin Nichols:
Because all that information is front loaded. We don't want you to show up at the class and half the class be on the same page of music and know what's going on and the other half be 45 minutes behind and not know what's going on and having to catch those people up at the expense of these guys. So if we can get all that stuff front loaded, get everybody on the same page and on the same sheet of music, and have them ready to launch when they get there, it's incredibly helpful for us.
Bill Godfrey:
And if I'm a betting man, I'm saying that most of our listeners who have training responsibility are like, oh God, prerequisites, they never work. Nobody shows up with 'em done. We hear you. We get it. And we agree, which is why we redesigned the classroom management system and the student registration system to account for that.
Kevin Nichols:
The changes we've made to the mCADi system allow the instructor now to publish the class far in advance of when he wants to deliver the class. He gets a class code, he can send that out to the people he wants to come to his class. This class code allows that student to register for the class and take the pretest. If that student does not have QuickStart, they will get notified that they're put on a wait list and that they have to complete the QuickStart before the beginning of the class. The system will automatically send them updates every few days. Hey, you need to have QuickStart before you take the class. And then three days before the published start of the class, the lead instructor will get an email saying, these people are on your wait list, they've signed up and they haven't completed QuickStart. So it allows that instructor to reach out individually to those people to get them through the QuickStart process. It really is, has made the automation on the system has really made it very easy to complete the process.
Bill Godfrey:
And I'll add one more thing. At any point, the trainer, the lead trainer can now sign in and look at who has registered and who's completed, who hasn't completed, who's on the wait list. So you can wait for it to email you three days ahead of the class, but you can also monitor that as it unfolds. But come the class start time, if they haven't completed QuickStart before you start, it won't enroll 'em.
Kevin Nichols:
Yeah, we really don't want to have people in the class who aren't on the same page. You don't wanna slow down the people who did take the initiative to go out and complete the QuickStart program, you really want everybody on the same page at the beginning of class.
Bill Godfrey:
So that's the prerequisite. We come into class still a little bit of lecture?
Kevin Nichols:
Still a little bit of lecture. We want to hit the high points of what QuickStart covered in case, you know, it's been a while since people maybe have taken Quickstart or just to clarify some points to make sure everybody is tracking along the same lines and that we can start at the same start spot. Everybody's at the same spot when we start.
Bill Godfrey:
Yeah, but isn't it, it's more than just a review, Kevin. I mean there's actually a deeper dive in that first 15 minutes. There's a little bit deeper dive into a couple of those topics that isn't, we don't go into depth in QuickStart.
Kevin Nichols:
Yeah. We wanna make sure we, we do those deep dives so that people have an understanding of it. When I say, you know, getting everybody on the same page, it's not just the knowledge in QuickStart, obviously it's also making sure those more complex topics that we talk through breakdown and are able to discuss and make sure everybody's where they need to be.
Bill Godfrey:
And then after that first 15 minutes, we move to scenarios.
Kevin Nichols:
And we run three prescribed scenarios. These scenarios are scripted and they're in the trainer manual. So the trainers know these are the scenarios I need to run. These are the mandated scenarios. And what that does is it provides consistency across, if I'm teaching a class in Washington state or if I'm teaching a class in Georgia, I've got the same class with the same guidelines and the same scenarios and the same objectives.
Bill Godfrey:
We also increased the number. So before you were expected to get two scenarios done and there was always a hope, you might get to a third, but nobody ever did. Now, three scenarios are mandatory and there is time to do a fourth if you choose to do so. But the first three scenarios are scripted. And the reason why, because when we did our quality checks to find out what trainers were actually doing in the field, it was all over the place. This is a basic entry-level course. And we discovered that some trainers were giving very basic scenarios that were appropriate, while others were essentially giving them a complex coordinated attack with three attackers in multiple locations on their very first scenario outta the gate. It was an unwinnable scenario, which defeats the purpose, is outside the scope of the class, the whole bit. And so in order to standardize that, we said, okay, these are the scenarios that you need to run. But once you run those three, if you got time for a fourth,
Kevin Nichols:
You're there. And what that does is it builds that consistency, like you talked about. It builds that consistency. It builds the standard because at the end of the day, quality equals consistency. If we're able to make sure that the class is consistent across the the nation, everybody who gets it gets the same thing, then we're building that quality and that consistency.
Bill Godfrey:
Absolutely. And people say, well wait a minute, quality equals consistency. What if you're consistently bad? You can't fix it and make it better until you're doing something consistently. If one day it's good and the other day it's not good, it's very difficult to get to the bottom and the fix. So consistency is quality and when we can get everybody doing it the same way, we can dial that up and get it locked in so that it's great the same way each time.
What else did we change? Anything else on the, on the ASIM Basic? We left time for some discussion and the post-test at the end and the wrap up.
Kevin Nichols:
Right. So again, right now we have about 15 to maybe 30 minutes of lectures at the beginning. You've got those three scenarios. If you have time to run to the fourth, you've got the fourth and then you do the wrap up and the post-test. And then we're out the door.
Bill Godfrey:
For our trainers out there, we probably ought to let them know what we've done to change the package that they download and teach from. So talk a little bit about the new package, how it works, how they use it.
Kevin Nichols:
So it comes as a zip file because it is a lot of data in that file. We couldn't just post it online. We moved it into an HTML file. That is very much, it's very similar to PowerPoint. It works the same way with the advances, but it's not a PowerPoint file. So the videos become a part of the file, you're able to download that, you unzip it and run it on your machine. There's a text read me file in the package that gives you instructions on how to run it and it's all right there for you.
Bill Godfrey:
It's pretty simple to do. And on top of that, you also have all the documents you need. So you have the participant guide, you have the trainer guide if you need to look something up and refresh yourself. You also have a copy of the course design document, which if you're in an area that does post credits, CEUs, or something like that, you very often have to submit your course design document in order to qualify for credits in the jurisdiction. And all that's in the package too.
Kevin Nichols:
Yes. All accessible to the trainer. And they can get that sent up to, like you said, their post agencies or the agency that runs their continuing ed units.
Bill Godfrey:
And here's the other thing, it doesn't rely on anything other than a browser. It runs on Windows, it runs on Mac, runs on Linux, all of them. All you need is a browser and then this thing works. So I was pretty excited to see that come together as our new platform for distributing the content.
Kevin Nichols:
Yeah, I think that's gonna be the standard moving forward with our ASIM, the SSAVEIM classes you spoke of and even the ASIM Advance class. I think we're moving to that format.
Bill Godfrey:
So let's talk real quick about the ASIM Basic Train the Trainer and the changes that occurred there before we move on to talking about ASIM Advance. So the ASIM Basic Train the Trainer used to be a two day 16 hour delivery. So basically on day one you would have your trainers come in. I think it was up to 10 trainers and day one they would learn the curriculum and then day two they would do the teachbacks. And we had to do that because there was all this lecture that they had to learn, they had to practice with the scenarios. We needed to make sure that they knew how to do the scenarios. Well now with this new format, we've made it easier for the trainers to learn how to deliver this material.
Kevin Nichols:
Absolutely. So now, like you mentioned, a lot of the lecture is front loaded, so it's front loaded through the QuickStart program, so we don't have to spend as much time making sure everybody's on the same page there. It allows us to shrink the time spent in class for the Train the Trainer. We're no longer a 16 hour class, it's an eight hour class and we've doubled the number of people we can put into it. So we can put 20 trainers through a class at a time. This allows for you to get more people spun up and able to deliver the training. And also by scripting the scenarios, we've made it a lot easier for the trainers to learn the scenarios because now they have a guide, a go by, a guide by which they can follow and know, hey, this is the way the scenario should be run. And it allows them to learn it and for us to make sure they know it before we leave.
Bill Godfrey:
So the new ASIM Basic train the trainer, one day, you get 20 trainers out of it, and all of the material you need to start teaching the next day.
Kevin Nichols:
Absolutely.
Bill Godfrey:
And so before we leave ASIM Basic, I wanna make sure we also talk to the trainers out there about the update that just went live for them publicly. So there is an ASIM Basic v.4 trainer update for everybody that was already a trainer. It's an hour and 15 minutes to get through the material. It's 11 modules. There's short videos that you can watch at your convenience. After each one there's a little bit of a post-test and that gets you squared away for another three years on your certificate for your trainer. It gets you updated to the new material, it gets you access to the new material and it secures your certificate for another three years and it costs nothing. It is completely free to do. Completely free to do.