Hazardous Materials and Equipment Safety Training for Students in Courses
Background
San Diego State University is focused on ensuring that students understand the basic principles of working with hazardous materials and hazardous equipment. In 2018, SDSU was audited by the Chancellor’s Office at California State University (CSU) and the State of California. All students enrolled in courses involving the use of hazardous materials or equipment must be informed of course hazards and receive appropriate safety training.
Until recently, training was documented in the form of a Student Safety Training Acknowledgement Form, signed by each student and retained by the School or Department for 3 years. Based on feedback from departments and instructors, Environmental Health and Safety (EHS) has developed a Canvas module which can be incorporated into existing courses and is an effective and easy paperless method for fulfilling hazard acknowledgement and training.
The Canvas module, entitled Hazardous Materials and Hazardous Equipment in Instructional Courses, includes a video training and a short survey that records student participation. Canvas will automatically retain the training records, so retention requirements will be met with no further actions needed by the instructor.
Departments that have their own safety training are encouraged to complement their material with the EHS Canvas module to facilitate the tracking of student compliance and to standardize record keeping amongst departments.
Requirements
Instructional courses using hazardous materials or equipment must import the "Hazardous Materials and Hazardous Equipment in Instructional Courses" module into their Canvas course and require students to complete the one question survey.
How to import the Canvas module?
Follow the instructions on this guideline: Importing the EHS training module into your Canvas course.
Auditing Process
At the end of every semester, courses involving the use of hazardous materials or equipment will be audited by a member of EHS in cooperation with Instructional Technology Services (ITS). The purpose of this audit is to evaluate whether the Canvas safety module Hazardous Materials and Hazardous Equipment in Instructional Courses was incorporated into the course and to assess the number of course registered students that completed the survey at the end of the module (as an indicator that the safety training module was completed). No additional information will be collected. Once this information is gathered, ITS will remove EHS access to the course.
By facilitating the auditing process we are not only complying with the observations of the CSU and State of California auditors, but most importantly, we are improving our efforts to keep students safe.