The Lab Safety Basics training course is a stand-alone training course that was created in 2016 to fulfill compliance requirements, functioning as a prerequisite for laboratory access and research employment. The training course provides foundational safety information for all researchers, staff, and students who will be working in a laboratory environment at UGA. Over the years, the course has gone through two updates — one in 2021 with the introduction of new topics and again in 2025. The 2025 update stemmed from learner feedback that the course was too long (1hour), the graphics were outdated, and certain topics were redundant or unnecessary for learners to know.
Include only the basic topics about lab safety that are applicable to all learners.
Reflect new federal safety guidelines.
Update emergency procedures.
Create shorter modules.
Implement interactive quizzes.
Enhance accessibility.
The evaluation plan was created to provide the project stakeholders with a way to determine whether the 2025 update to the Lab Safety Basics course effectively met its stated objectives, while still preparing participants to safely and confidently enter UGA research labs.
Within this collaborative venture, my role consisted of:
Managing the project team: Ran team meetings, shared content updates, reviewed files, flagged errors and inconsistencies, finalized the evaluation plan, and kept everyone on schedule with deliverables.
Building the Logic Model: Created the visual outline of the logical relationships between the various components of the Lab Safety Basics training course.
Curating Evaluation Questions: Crafted one-third of the evaluation questions. The questions I curated focused on assessing learning gains, instructional effectiveness, design improvements, and the impact of contextual constraints on training outcomes.
Building the Data Collection Tool: Created a Likert scale survey to address the research question "How well did the updated course address the concerns about course length, relevance, and usability?".