BIB2021 is a 3-credit undergraduate course in the Building Surveying programme. Its learning outcomes require students to explain health and safety scenarios in the Malaysian construction industry, study the needs of health and safety management in relation to legislation, describe the procedure of risk management in construction, and complete a technical report based on health and safety management in the construction industry . The course carries a 60% continuous assessment and 40% final examination structure, which allows a significant part of student learning to be developed and assessed through coursework during the semester .
Design intention
This course is designed to help students move beyond seeing health and safety as a list of rules or legal provisions. My intention is to help them understand how safety, health, and risk are experienced, interpreted, and managed in real construction settings. While the course does have technical and legal dimensions, it also opens up more space for discussion and critical interpretation than some of my other technical courses. For that reason, it allows the constructivist aspect of my teaching philosophy to be pushed further.
What matters to me in this course is that students do not merely repeat what legislation says. I want them to think critically about why health and safety matters, how risk is understood in human and professional terms, and how uncertainty becomes meaningful in real situations. In that sense, BIB2021 is designed to help students connect legal and technical knowledge to lived experience, professional responsibility, and practical judgement.
Assessment design
The course uses three forms of continuous assessment:
Individual essay
Group site report
The individual essay is designed to train students in academic writing before they reach the more demanding stage of final-year thesis work. The task asks them to analyse Speaking the Language of Safety: Overcoming Communication Challenges for Foreign Workers in Construction, using academic and professional sources, with proper citation, referencing, and transparent documentation of AI use . I use this task not only to assess content understanding, but also to develop their ability to write in an academic register, structure an argument, and use evidence responsibly.
The group coursework asks students to produce a technical report reviewing safety and health procedures at a live construction site . The site must be real, active, and accessible to the students, and they are expected to secure access themselves. Before they proceed, they must first identify a possible case site and bring it forward for vetting. This is an important checkpoint because I want to ensure that the site is suitable, feasible, and capable of supporting the intended learning.
The report requires students to review construction drawings for hazards, analyse the site’s health and safety organisation, examine compliance and non-compliance with OSHA-related requirements, and propose remedies . This makes the task more than a descriptive site visit. It is a structured exercise in observation, compliance review, technical analysis, and professional reporting.
Class participation
The remaining 10% is reserved for active participation during contact sessions and completion of self-directed learning packages. This is important to me because I want to verify individual contribution during collaborative class activities, not only judge what is submitted at the end. In this way, the assessment structure recognises both final output and visible engagement in the learning process.
How the teaching works
The course is organised in two broad parts. The first part focuses on health and safety, beginning with issues and challenges in the construction industry, then moving into legal frameworks, duties of employers and employees, the role of DOSH and NIOSH, and the promotion of safety culture. The second part focuses on risk management, beginning with broader risk concepts and then moving into construction-specific risks and the control of specific hazards such as fire, chemical, biological, manual-handling, working-at-height, and site movement risks .
The contact sessions are mostly workshop-style. I usually begin with a short briefing on the learning outcome for the topic and what the class will be exploring that day. Students are then directed to resources I have curated on Moodle, often accompanied by guiding questions, and are expected to discuss these in groups and produce some form of learning artefact for presentation. For suitable topics, I also use cooperative learning structures such as jigsaw activities. One example is the teaching of accident causation models, where students work through different perspectives and then teach one another.
When students are working, I move between groups to listen to their reasoning, challenge assumptions, pose “what if” scenarios, and correct misconceptions where necessary. I see this as an important part of the teaching process because it allows me to strengthen both their understanding and their presentation of ideas while learning is still happening. As with my other courses, each session ends with a summary so that students can consolidate what they have explored and connect it back to the topic learning outcome.
What this course shows about my teaching
BIB2021 is a good example of my teaching because it shows how I use collaborative workshop-style sessions to push students beyond passive acceptance of technical and legal content. The nature of the course allows for more open discussion than some of my other undergraduate technical modules, and that gives me more room to engage students in critical thinking, dialogue, and meaning-making. I want them to connect what they learn about health, safety, and risk to what they already understand as people living with uncertainty, and then build more rigorous professional understanding from that starting point.
The course also shows how I design assessment to serve different educational purposes within the same module. The essay develops academic writing and disciplined use of sources. The site report develops field observation, compliance analysis, and professional reporting. The participation component values visible contribution during class. Together, these allow the course to support not only technical and legal understanding, but also interpretation, communication, responsibility, and judgement.