Abstract
This paper provides a proposal of an additional course in Safety Engineering and explains the importance of this course and the topics it will cover. The suggestions and information for the course were taken from reliable sources; the research showed that valid information for the Safety Engineering course will be highly useful for the students interested in Industrial Engineering.
The Ten-Week schedule proposed in the paper is based on the contents of the textbook selected for the course and designed to cover all the most important aspects of Safety Engineering. The paper proves the use and meaning of this subject objectively and globally and elaborates on its contents from the pedagogical point of view.
Introduction
Safety is a highly important issue in any field and during any work process. There is a probability of having an accident at any work place. Such accidents normally may bring complications and difficulties to the work process. Possible consequences of accidents can be of different types. Accidents may result in the delay in the work process, it may negatively affect the reputation of the whole organization, it may include victims, besides, people touched by the accident may react differently, which will cause law suits for the company.
One accident is able to destroy the harmony and balance for the whole organization and create multiple kinds of discomforts. Besides, accidents will definitely cause the loss of income in that way or another. This is why the meaning and importance of safety engineering in any field cannot and should not be underestimated. The profession of a safety engineer is connected with lots of responsibilities, precision, tension and attention (Spellman, Whiting, 6).
The process needs to be monitored and watched very carefully all the time. Safety engineers are responsible for such aspects of the work process as safety and health training, injury prevention, collecting the statistics and data, making a research, learning the chances and causes of various types of accidents.
Safety engineers are involved into case studies and investigations. Accidents that may happen at the work place are not only connected to the equipment and the ways it is being operated, the areas of safety engineering also include such spheres as computer and data security and violence at the workplace.
There is a lot to manage for a safety engineering professional. All of these aspects are crucial in the modern world that is filled with dangerous equipment, heavy machinery, chemicals, pressure and stress. Proper and well-educated safety management can and will save many human lives. This is why this discipline is necessary in the course of engineering.
Background
The history of safety counts thousands of years and goes back to ancient times when our forefathers all around the world were making the first connections between the health problems of people working in different area and the kinds of occupations they were involved into daily. The first researchers were trying to find out ways and methods of avoiding or at least minimizing the risk of the dangerous and unwanted outcomes.
Since ancient times people learnt to understand the impacts unsafe workplaces make on the workers and the importance of organized measures created to protect the working process and the health of the employees. In 1600s the first safely laws and insurances were put into action in Britain. The first policies were worked out and the first inspection programs were launched in the most dangerous workplaces.
In the beginning of 1900 the United States of America started their first, which obliged the employers to compensate their workers for the injuries they received at the workplace and during the work (Morrison, par. 1). In 1970s the first standards for OSHA were employed, these standards were designed to organize the basic requirements for safety measures and health protection at the workplaces in the United States.
These days the safety policy is very developed, it covers many areas and cases, it is based on multiple of precedents and centuries of experience, this policy is complicated and it is being changed and developed and extended every day to be able to match the world that is developing with very high speed.
Course Information
Description
The course IE 381 called Safety Management is designed to introduce the students, who have chosen to study industrial engineering to such important part of industrial engineering and maintenance and management of safety.
Together with courses IE 367 Production Planning and Control, IE 368 Facility Design and Operations Management and IE 380 The Responsible Engineer this course will teach about analysis and evaluation of the quality of different areas of the work process, responsibilities of the profession of an industrial engineer, the meaning of social and environmental effects engineering is able to create and importance of high quality training and proper education for a professional in this sphere.
The course contains such topics as introduction and historical perspective of safety engineering, safety terminology, regulatory requirements, recognizing, evaluation and controlling of safety at the workplace, fundamental engineering concepts, management aspects, industrial hygiene and accident investigations, injury prevention and personal protective equipment, hazard safety, office communication, fire safety, pressure vessels, rigging safety, noise hazards, radiation safety, computer and data security, workplace violence, motor vehicle safety, safety and health training, safety inspections.
This course will cover multiple necessary subjects in order to allow the students to learn to understand the meaning of safety engineering, its tasks and the way it operates. It involves such disciplines as history, terminology, case studies and industrial engineering.
The course is designed to inform the students about the most common and most dangerous issues of the contemporary engineering and allow them approach them, address them and work out solutions, see the mechanics of very importance processes, that have to be researched and studied carefully because good professionals working in the sphere of safety engineering will always been needed.
This curse if offered for several reasons. First of all the course of safety engineering is a very useful aspect of understanding of the broad area of industrial engineering, it also provides the learners with knowledge about the sphere of industrial engineering and its mechanisms. The course elaborates about the responsibilities of an engineer and shows the seriousness and importance of this profession.
Besides, this course and its contents are the great learning tools, which will provide the students with the development of their abilities to evaluate predict and recognize various factors. The course teaches about the process of investigation of accidents, which is very useful and supplies an opportunity to demonstrate critical thinking and analysis skills, which are necessary for people choosing the profession of an industrial engineer.
This course fulfills the students need for knowledge and development of thinking, capacity to see the problems know the ways to solve them.
The course will meet both professional and academic needs of the students, it will provide the learners with a lot of useful information and the basis for further research in this area, it also will widen the students understanding of the profession of an industrial engineer and give them an opportunity to select better ways to express themselves as professional and choose the most suitable area of industrial engineering for the future. The course is designed to fulfill the major core.
Outcomes
The course will provide several learning outcomes and organize the students’ knowledge in order to give them the opportunity to apply it during the process of studies and use them while attending other classes. The outcomes the course of Safety Engineering is going to provide are:
- Knowledge – the course will supply the learners with necessary information of the established sphere, it will also bring awareness of the modern problems and ways of dealing with them, the course will cover the background of the subject and its history, follow contemporary tendencies and look at the precedents and accidents in order to show how all these spheres of knowledge are interrelated.
- Application – the course will provide a chance to apply the received knowledge to investigate cases and find gaps in the safety systems, it will elaborate on the methods of forming safety and health teaching programs, working out solutions for different kinds of issues.
- Thinking – the course will assist with the development of critical thinking and evaluation skills, responsible decision making on the basis of the information provided.
- Learning – one of the tasks of the course is to create an opportunity for the students to learn independently without being controlled and directed by the instructor. This outcome includes independent reading, critical thinking and comprehension of the information provided within the course and given by the outside sources.
- Communication – the course provides the learners with the ability to widen their professional vocabulary due to suggested terminology, which will allow the future professionals to understand and speak about specific problems and intellectual matters.
- Inquiry – the knowledge offered by this course will let the students develop their personal intellectual inquiry and curiosity for the subject and its further research, recognize and evaluate various aspects of it, view the problems from the point of view of an educated professional.
Resources
There is a wide range of resources suitable for this course. The students willing to expand their understanding of various aspects of safety engineering and research it from different points of view and perspectives will be able to do that through various sources of information provided by the internet, literature, articles and journals covering multiple topics that may interest the curious reader. For the deeper understanding the students may use the book called “Reliability and Safety Engineering” by Verma, Ajit and Karanki.
It presents the mathematical side of quality, probability and reliability of the equipment and the work process in general. The authors of “Reliability and Safety Engineering” provide the readers with formulas, axioms and algebraic approach towards the mechanisms of safety engineering (Verma, Ajit and Karanki, 6). This book is filled with theoretical information as well as practical demonstrations and applications. For more theoretical knowledge the students may visit the official websites of American Society of Safety Engineers.
There is a lot of information about this sphere of engineering on this resource. The website provides the readers with social information, publications, professional affairs, history of the organizations, press releases and the latest news of the field (The American Society of Safety Engineers, par. 1). Textbook proposed for this course is written by Spellman and Whiting and called “Safety Engineering: Principles and Practices”.
This book suggests wide range of information covering the most important aspects of safety engineering – its history and background, the widely used terms and professional language, the spheres that safety engineering covers, different types of accidents that may happen at the workplaces, methods of investigation, recognition and evaluation of safety standards and errors, organization of safety and health trainings, safety inspections and data collection and analysis.
The proposed course of Safety Engineering will be based on this book.
Ten-Week Schedule
Each of the topics is based on the book by Spellman and Whiting and will be covering around fifty pages of reading. In the end of each section there are review questions about the topic covered in it. The questions are designed to sum up and complete the students’ work on the reading and reinforce the newly received knowledge.
The course has a great range of themes and covers many important contemporary problems, the students will be involved into a learning process that allows viewing the subject from various angles and exploring different sides of it. The program is designed to make the students develop different types of thinking and memory.
Conclusion
The course in safety engineering is highly important for students intending to pursue the profession in the field of industrial engineering. This base of knowledge is necessary for a person involved into working in any area of engineering. The information provided by this course is broad and detailed, it allows the learners conduct their own research and explore the sphere of safety engineering deeper, it also give the students an opportunity to see the organizational sides of the process of industrial engineering.
This course presents the field of safety engineering as a very productive way of improvement of income and management in any organization, because the employees that feel safe and protected at their workplace bring better results. The course is specialized on developing various ways of thinking and analysis.
The students will be encouraged to apply critical thinking during this course, they will be trained to evaluate and recognize the issues, react to them and suggest ways of resolutions, search for reasons and causes of various accidents, investigate cases and explore various tendencies, which lead to negative or positive outcomes. The course in safety engineering is designed to fulfill the students’ need for knowledge and research.
The literature provided in the course is various and contains different types of information, that covers the topics from all sides, suggests theoretical and practical approaches, application of precise calculation and logical thinking, exploration of philosophical and historical issues, social factors and human behavior.
To my mind, this course is necessary for the program because it has many layers and sides, it is able to provide the learners with all the necessary opportunities to develop their professional skills and improve their understanding of the subject.
Works Cited
Morrison, Charles. A History of Safety. 2007. Web.
Spellman, Frnak R., Nancy Whiting. Safety Engineering: Principles and Practices. Lanham, Maryland: Government Institutes, 2004. Print.
The American Society of Safety Engineers. ASSE. 2014. Web.
Verma, Ajit Kumar, Ajit, Srividiya and Durga Rao Karanki. Reliability and Safety Engineering. New York, New York: Springer, 2010. Print.