Radiation users can complete the safety training on their own time at their own pace, sometimes from the convenience of their own homes. Understaffed radiation safety offices don't have to commit personnel to the often time-consuming task of arranging and giving live training sessions to the users. Online radiation safety training should be a win-win situation for users and radiation safety offices alike, but it does not take into account the different learning styles that people have. However, we also offer live safety training seminars in parallel with the Web-based ones. It would seem to be a duplication of effort and waste of personnel resources to offer both live and Web-based training, but we feel that offering a choice of training methods justifies it.
Some people learn best by listening to a lecture, while others learn best by reading the material.
Even in these days of declining radiation safety office budgets, we cannot forget that the point of offering safety training is not just to fulfill regulatory requirements, but to train users. Therefore, it only makes sense to offer safety training in such a way to accommodate different learning styles. A study performed by a major automobile manufacturer found that quality control suffered when too much detail was required of workers to complete computerized checklists. Apparently, the level of detail required to fill out the checklists was so high that the workers paid more attention to completing the checklists than to the product they were inspecting. When the checklists were modified to require less detail, quality control improved because workers were actually looking at the product itself.