An interactive online short course from Purdue and IEEE helps better equip learners with essential knowledge and skills to help integrate safety into engineering designs, emphasizing a proactive approach to minimizing risks of safety issues. The focus includes electrical shock and fire hazards along with ethical and legal considerations often encountered in the product design process.
One of the best ways to make a product or process safe is to proactively engineer safety into the product from the start.
That’s the focus of a new online certification course developed by Purdue University and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) Product Safety Engineering Society (PSES). The interactive self-paced short course is tailored to equip learners with essential knowledge and skills to integrate safety into engineering design effectively.
Product Safety: An Introduction for Effective Engineering Design covers analyzing and integrating safety features into product design, understanding ethical and legal responsibilities and identifying key principles for safe design. The course emphasizes a proactive approach to minimizing risks of safety issues (and measures to address them), with focus on electrical shock and fire hazards.
The material offers insights into emerging technologies and challenges, and underscores throughout the importance of prioritizing product safety in design to identify, assess and help mitigate potential hazards in a variety of contexts.
“This course from Purdue and IEEE is an outstanding example of excellence at scale in online learning,” said Dimitrios Peroulis, Purdue’s senior Vice President for partnerships and online. “It is an accessible, engaging and effective professional development opportunity that has the potential to yield great benefits through promoting product safety as a central element of engineering design.”
Individuals who complete the course successfully will learn to:
- Analyze the significance of integrating safety features into product design by evaluating potential risks and benefits.
- Evaluate ethical and legal responsibilities associated with ensuring the safety of product design and manufacturing processes.
- Identify fundamental principles and components necessary for creating safe product designs.
- Differentiate between proactive and reactive approaches to product safety design and assess their respective advantages and limitations.
“The journey features practical, foundational self-taught modules with plenty of graphics and examples to help grasp simple, but realistic product safety building blocks,” said Jim Bender, IEEE/PSES vice president for education. “The course will help provide awareness to engineers, technicians and other technologists in the art of product safety during the product design phase.”
The course features four modules, each with a built-in learning activity and a knowledge self-check, including:
- Why Product Safety is Design Critical
- Ethical and Legal Obligations
- Electrical Shock Hazards
- Fire Hazards
The modules can be completed in less than two hours. Leaners earn a certificate once they pass a final assessment with a 100% score.
For more information and to register for Product Safety: An Introduction for Effective Engineering Design, visit this website. The fee for the course is US$99.
