Continuing education instructor shows it’s never too late to learn

Rick Gividen spent almost 20 years serving in the United States Army and has been involved in teaching remote continuing education for various government agencies for another 25 years.

He certainly doesn’t need a graduate degree to further his career. But he wanted one. He also didn’t want to disappoint himself with another unfinished item on his to-do list.

“At one point I planned to run a marathon once a year for 20 years, but I only did eight and had to admit I was probably not going to complete all of them,” said Gividen, whose undergraduate degree came back in 1981. “I believe in goal setting and just couldn’t bring myself to let the master’s degree slip off the list.”

Gividen will complete his master’s in leadership and organization development (LOD) through University of Idaho Boise in Spring 26. The project he created for his comprehensive final exam, a video game-style quiz called Fire Behavior Face-Off, might solve the problem of how to better assess the current skill level of the wildland fire workforce.

“Rick is a lifelong learner with a strong drive and sense of curiosity,” said Laura Holyoke, associate professor at U of I’s College of Education, Health and Human Sciences. “For someone like him, it’s about continuing to take on challenges in adult learning and coming up with unique ways to get people interested in learning more about their job.”

Playing with fire

Heather Heward ’06, ’09, ’25 is another person interested in finding unique ways for on-the-job training. A senior fire ecology and management instructor at U of I, Heward is constantly on the lookout for ways to get training and up-to-date information about firefighting to crews where they need it most — in the field.

Even before they got to know each other through Gividen’s studies, Gividen and Heward were loosely connected through the Wildland Fire Learning Portal (WFLP), an online training tool used by federal, state, local and Tribal wildland fire workforces.

Gividen has managed the WFLP for several years, including while studying for his master’s degree.

Interested in giving firefighters ways to test their knowledge of wildland fire behavior, Gividen started working on Fire Behavior Face-Off during the early stages of his studies in U of I’s LOD program.

And true to Gividen’s curious nature, he wanted the game to not just test a firefighter’s knowledge, but also to be enjoyable enough that participation would take off like … wildfire.

“Its main purpose is as an assessment tool to gather thousands of points of data on their knowledge related to wildland fire behavior,” he said. “But as far as they are concerned, it’s a game, and they are trying to earn bragging rights by getting better scores than their buddies.”

Once he received approval to complete the quiz as his final project, he sought assistance from Heward and Ryan Arp ’24, who are both graduates of U of I’s LOD program, with technical and statistical data.

The quiz consists of 10 random questions about three areas of fire behavior — topography, fuel and weather — and needs to be completed in two minutes or under. Gividen, Heward and Arp are currently testing the quiz with multiple groups from our nation’s wildland fire workforce and will soon be reviewing data to see what modifications may be needed for a larger rollout.

“We’ll use the data to determine what areas we need to address for training and maybe even determine if different types of crews need different training,” Gividen said. “But the exciting part is that the students are learning and they don’t even know it. They’re just playing a game and trying to beat the high score.”

Field test

Over the years, Gividen has used laserdiscs, VHS tapes and satellite TV to connect his audiences to learning opportunities. For this project, however, he used some lessons he learned watching his son play video games to create something he hopes end users will refer to as “fire.”

“I wanted to create graphics that looked like the cover of a video game,” he said. “I had a lot of conversations with generative AI until I got something I liked. Then I did some A/B field testing with a hotshot crew until we got something really engaging.”

Heward, who has several groups of students at the College of Natural Resources that could benefit from understanding more about learning behaviors in the field, appreciates the hard work being done by people like Gividen, who aren’t doing it because they have to, but because they want to.

“Rick is going way above what’s necessary for the class with this project,” Heward said. “He’s genuinely curious about the outcome. Does this work? Do people engage in this? It’s all about wanting to understand how people learn.”

For Gividen, who took advantage of U of I’s Senior Scholar Tuition Waiver for his LOD studies, completing his degree ended up meaning more than just scratching an item off his to-do list.

“The knowledge I’ve gained from this program has been very applicable for my job and current responsibilities,” he said. “The entire experience has been amazing. I can’t say enough about U of I, how proud I am to be a Vandal and how proud I am to have achieved my goal here.”