NASA Safety Center

The NASA Safety Center’s (NSC) customer base includes 1,000 civil servants and 2,000 contractors geographically dispersed across the entire U.S., supporting all 10 major NASA centers.  Prior to the establishment of NASA’s Technical Excellence Organization and the Safety and Mission Assurance Technical Excellence Program (STEP), formal on-demand safety training didn’t exist and there was no efficient way to support these agency-wide needs.  In 2008, the NASA Safety Center began using Mediasite, which, along with some innovation and ingenuity, changed the way the NSC could distribute learning.

For example, the NASA Academy of Program and Project Engineering Leadership’s (APPEL) Risk Management course was traditionally taught three times a year in a classroom to approximately 30 students per session.  APPEL strategically rotated this class around the various NASA Centers to accommodate as many learners as possible, but it would have been very costly and time consuming for all STEP learners to take the course.  In its traditional instructor-led format, it would have cost $1,000,000 to conduct enough sessions to put all of the Civil Servant STEP Learners through the mandatory eight-hour class.  In addition, it would have taken a minimum of 33 dedicated sessions and 11 years to train all 1,000 STEP learners in the traditional format.

That course is just one of the 250 courses included in the six STEP career-oriented, advanced safety-engineering, professional development curriculums now offered at no cost to all 17,000 NASA Civil Servants and their contractor community.  Via the NASA LMS, the NSC can now offer online courses created with Mediasite on demand 24/7. 

"With this lecture-capture technology, we've been able to capture this course, host it on our server, and turn it around for $8,000-$10,000, yielding a 140-to-1 return on investment from a cost perspective.  Through this on-demand training capability, all of our learners can now get through this training in less than a month," said John Marinaro, Director of Technical Excellence at NASA Safety Center. "We've gotten about 33,000 hours of utilization out of those web-based courses and about 1,900 graduates. If they were taught in the classroom I'd have only a handful of graduates today and somewhere in the neighborhood of 1,000 hours of training completed, at the most."