Energy Safety Canada

Learning doesn’t end at graduation, and businesses understand that continuous learning is crucial for success. At Energy Safety Canada (ESC), ongoing learning contributes to something even more important than organizational success—the safety of the energy workers it serves and supports.

ESC is the national safety association for Canada’s energy industry. It was created by industry for industry with a single purpose to improve safety. For the last five years, it has leveraged Brightspace to provide safety training to workers, contributing to one of the best industry safety records in Canada.

In early 2018, ESC selected Brightspace as its learning management system. Scott McRae, program development manager at ESC, said that Brightspace provided its Program Development team the opportunity to approach training in new and more effective ways.

“We collaborated with the D2L team through training, working with their learning and technical experts and by attending Fusion, an annual learning conference. We saw how we could positively impact our industry in terms of the health and safety of workers, accessibility, and time and cost savings,” McRae said.

Keeping workers safe

ESC created a Common Safety Orientation (CSO) course to provide a more consistent health and safety introduction for energy workers across Canada. Many companies now require workers to complete either the online or in-class version of the course before entering a work site. McRae said that standardizing the program reduced redundant training and allowed for easier transferability of workers from site to site.

Since launching the online CSO in 2018, more than 100,000 energy workers have completed the training. McRae said that the success of any online course depends on the effectiveness of the content and its delivery methods.

“Course design must attract the learner not only to complete the course, but also to implement it in real-time scenarios,” McRae said.

Evaluating feedback from learners is critical to training program success, so ESC developed student satisfaction surveys to measure success and give direction to its instructional design team.

An inside look

The ESC team developed the CSO in Articulate Storyline and exported it as a SCORM object for use in Brightspace. McRae said that creating, uploading and organizing content allowed them to easily mix elements of SCORM objects with content built within Brightspace.

The course includes:

• a landing page
• course materials
• a student survey
• proctoring application
• a final exam
• a custom widget displays the completion criteria to students as they progress through the training

“The infrastructure of Brightspace is robust and gives the designer a wide range of configurations for setup and implementation,” McRae said.

One example McRae shared was when a new assignment or quiz is added to Brightspace, a grade item is automatically added to the grade book with a corresponding notification on the assignments page.

Using Brightspace, ESC has made several of its course offerings available online, either as blended learning, self-directed courses, or synchronous courses supported by a facilitator. McRae added that Brightspace’s consistent experience and responsiveness across mobile devices significantly improved course participation.

“Brightspace gives learners more control over when, how and where they learn,” McRae added.

Measuring success

ESC uses the Kirkpatrick model to evaluate training success. Developed as a Ph.D. dissertation by Dr. Donald L. Kirkpatrick in the 1950s, the model has been employed for evaluating training programs in almost every industry. Today, the Kirkpatrick model is the standard for evaluating the effectiveness of training programs in the classroom and online learning.

The model measures training programs against four criteria—reaction, learning, behavior and results.  

ESC uses Quiz and Survey data reports from Brightspace to drive continuous improvement.

Reaction data is gathered using the Brightspace Survey function. Participants’ responses are analyzed monthly to help inform decisions to create a better user experience. From the data, ESC has made updates to course accessibility and navigation, and content changes to clarify key safety messaging and drive consistency in the course.

Learning data is gathered using the reports from Brightspace Quizzes. The data allows ESC to identify how effectively learning objectives are satisfied and adjust content and quiz items accordingly. This resulted in several small improvements that have made a big difference to the learning outcomes of the course.

“Gathering this type of feedback is key to our continuous improvement,” McRae said.