New short course from Purdue and IEEE integrates safety into engineering design and manufacturing

WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. — One of the best ways to make a product or process safe is to proactively engineer safety into the product.  

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. Learners 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 $99. 

About Purdue University

Purdue University is a public research university leading with excellence at scale. Ranked among top 10 public universities in the United States, Purdue discovers, disseminates and deploys knowledge with a quality and at a scale second to none. More than 107,000 students study at Purdue across multiple campuses, locations and modalities, including more than 58,000 at our main campus in West Lafayette and Indianapolis. Committed to affordability and accessibility, Purdue’s main campus has frozen tuition 14 years in a row. See how Purdue never stops in the persistent pursuit of the next giant leap — including its comprehensive urban expansion, the Mitch Daniels School of Business, Purdue Computes and the One Health initiative — at https://www.purdue.edu/president/strategic-initiatives.