16. Developing Occupational Safety Skills for Safety Engineering Students in an Electronic Learning Environment

The competency-based transformation of the higher education system, the extension of digital technologies, and the introduction of the online education system required by the COVID epidemic together demanded a radical transformation of occupational safety education in safety engineering training. This article describes a two-semester graduate-level educational experiment on Occupational Safety and Health, its methodology, implementation, and experience. Students acquired professional activities to manage occupational health and safety in the first semester by investigating software applications and instrumentation. The theme of the second semester was the structured understanding of selected hazards in workplace risk assessment and the exploration of the limits of risk assessment as a methodology. The experiment met the educational objectives and achieved significant ability development with the active participation of students. Students had hands-on experiments using safety applications in the first semester and explored the possibility of adapting IT solutions already used in other security fields. In the second semester, students and the mentor explored the risk assessment practice boundaries. The difficulties of some hazard elaborations and the oral discussions highlighted possible weaknesses in workplace risk assessment practice, e.g., the importance of precise hazard formulation, the impact of accident casualisation models on the risk assessment, and the weaknesses of specific risk level determination practice.