NASA Safety Center

With Mediasite technology we have been able to capture courses for the NSC and host them for a fraction of the cost of delivering them classroom-style. We calculate that the risk management course alone provides a 140-to-1 return on investment for NASA.
Jim May, Alphaport Program Manager

Grounded

The NASA Safety Center, established in 2006, supports NASA’s safety and mission assurance requirements. One facet of their work is the Safety and Mission Assurance Technical Excellence Program (STEP) program, which delivers technical training online to about 1,000 government employees and 1,000 contractors. The STEP curriculum contains 150 online courses and counting.

Before Mediasite, Alphaport Inc. taught a risk management course three times a year in a classroom with 30 students at an astronomical price tag. In fact, it cost $1 million to conduct enough sessions to put 1,000 civil servants through the eight-hour class, and take a minimum of 33 sessions and 11 years to train all 1,000 learners. In this format, there would only be a handful of graduates and about 1,000 hours of training.

“We often find ourselves in the position of needing to bring the learning to the student because there’s no efficient way to get all of our learners to a single class event,” said Jim May, Alphaport’s Program Manager and lead trainer.

Solution

Alphaport delivers courses online with Mediasite providing the same training in technically one day, but realistically everyone can get through the virtual training in one month.

There are now 250 courses 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 learning management system, the NSC offers online courses created with Mediasite on-demand any time.

Liftoff

The ROI is nothing short of ground-breaking for NASA. The final ROI is expected to be 8-to-1, saving $5 million of the NASA budget.

Currently, 45 online courses represent 527 instructional hours in the STEP Safety and Mission Assurance curriculum. And 650 learners took those courses which resulted in 2,000 online course completions and nearly 12,000 online learning hours.

“With Mediasite technology we have been able to capture courses for the NSC and host them for a fraction of the cost of delivering them classroom-style,” May said. “We calculate that the risk management course alone provides a 140-to-1 return on investment for NASA. Also, with a video course, all Safety and Mission Assurance learners can take the training wherever and whenever they choose without having to travel. And that saves everyone time and money.”

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