Health, Safety and Wellbeing Policy

Deep Space Commodities is delivered entirely online. Learners never attend a venue, we run no live sessions, there is no travel, no practical work, no equipment supplied by us, and no in-person contact between learners and anyone acting for us. Shift AI Technology Ltd has a registered address at Unit 14, The Maltings Industrial Estate, Southminster, Essex, CM0 7EQ, but no learner attends it and no course activity takes place there.

The risks that do apply are those of prolonged screen-based study: musculoskeletal discomfort from poor posture, visual fatigue, and the cognitive fatigue that comes from trying to absorb too much at once. Those are the subject of this policy. It sets out the guidance we give learners, the design decisions we have made to reduce those risks, and the boundaries of our responsibility.

You will be watching video and answering questions on a screen for as long as you choose to study in one go. The following is standard display screen equipment guidance and it is worth following even for short sessions.

• Sit with your back supported and your feet flat on the floor or on a footrest. Avoid studying at length on a sofa, in bed, or hunched over a phone on a train.
• Position the screen roughly an arm's length away, with the top of the screen at or just below eye level, so you are not craning your neck up or bending it down.
• Keep your shoulders relaxed and your forearms roughly horizontal. If you are using a laptop for a long session, a separate keyboard and a stand that raises the screen make a substantial difference.
• Set the screen brightness to match the room rather than fighting it, and position yourself so that windows and lights are not reflecting off the display or shining directly into your eyes.
• Change posture regularly. Stand up, walk about and stretch — the discomfort comes from holding one position, not from the work itself.

Take a break between lessons. The self-paced, asynchronous format exists partly so that you can: nothing is live, nothing expires, progress is saved, and there is no cost to stopping mid-chapter and coming back tomorrow. Lifetime access means there is no deadline pushing you to continue when you have had enough.

A short break of a few minutes away from the screen every 30 to 45 minutes is more effective than a long break after two hours. Look at something distant, get a drink, move around.

The one part of the course that is timed is the module exam, which has a 30-minute limit per attempt. Take your break before you start one rather than during it, and if a condition means you need longer, additional time is available on request under our Equality, Diversity and Inclusion policy and does not require medical evidence.

Visual fatigue — dry, sore or tired eyes, blurred vision, headache — comes from staring at a fixed distance for a long time and blinking less than usual while you do it. Looking at something roughly twenty feet away for about twenty seconds every twenty minutes is the usual advice and it works.

The course helps by being built out of short pieces. There are 73 lessons across 12 chapters and they average only a few minutes each. That is a teaching decision first — short lessons are easier to absorb and easier to return to — but it also means there is a natural stopping point every few minutes rather than an hour-long recording you feel obliged to finish. Use those breaks; they are there for you.

Persistent eye strain, headaches or changes in vision are worth raising with an optician or a doctor rather than working through. If you use display screens as part of your job, your employer may be required to contribute to the cost of an eye test.

This is technical material. Trying to complete a whole chapter in one sitting is possible, but it is not the way to retain it, and a tired learner performs worse on the module exam than a rested one who split the chapter over two days.

• Treat two or three lessons as a reasonable session, and stop when you notice you are re-reading questions rather than answering them.
• Use the quick checks and the chapter practice quizzes as a signal. If you are getting them wrong on material you have just watched, you are tired rather than incapable — come back to it.
• Do not sit a module exam at the end of a long session. Sit it fresh.
• There is no penalty for going slowly. Nothing expires, chapters unlock in sequence rather than on a clock, and the practice layers have unlimited retries. The only limits in the course are the exam attempt rules, which are set out in our Assessment, Certification and Academic Integrity policy.

The course covers commercial, technical, financial and regulatory aspects of the space economy. No lesson contains distressing, graphic or hazardous material, there is nothing that requires a content warning, and nothing in the course asks a learner to carry out a practical activity, handle equipment or undertake anything physical.

If you nonetheless find something in the material upsetting, tell us at info@spaceeconomy.education and we will look at it.

Studying online carries a few ordinary digital risks and they are easy to manage.

• Use a strong, unique password for your course account and do not reuse one from another service.
• Do not share your login. A seat is for one person; sharing credentials is also a breach of assessment integrity and can cost you your certificate.
• Be wary of any email asking you to log in via a link, particularly if it claims your access is about to expire. We will never ask for your password, and access does not expire.
• If you study on a shared or public computer, log out afterwards.
• Tell us immediately at info@spaceeconomy.education if you think someone else has used your account.

On the wellbeing side: this is a professional course with no forum, no leaderboard, no streaks and no notifications chasing you to come back. There is nothing in the product designed to keep you on it longer than you want to be. If you are studying alongside a full workload, treat the course as work rather than as something to do after work.

Many of our learners are on seats bought by an employer and will study at their employer's premises or on their employer's equipment. Where that is the case, the employer's own health and safety arrangements apply — including their display screen equipment assessments, their eye test provision, their workstation and equipment provision, their first aid and their accident reporting. Those arrangements are not displaced by anything in this policy, and we have no ability to assess or control a workplace we have never seen.

If your workstation is uncomfortable or unsuitable, raise it with your employer under their arrangements. If your employer would like a short written description of what the course involves in order to complete their own assessment, ask us and we will provide one.

Learners studying at home or elsewhere are responsible for their own study environment. We are not able to inspect it, and this policy is guidance rather than a substitute for it.

There is no incident for us to record in the sense a venue-based provider would have, because we are not present anywhere a learner studies. If something about the course itself contributed to a health problem — a technical fault that caused flashing content, for example — please tell us, because that is a defect in the product and we will treat it as one.

Responsibility for this policy sits with the directors of Shift AI Technology Ltd. It is reviewed every 12 months, and sooner if the way the course is delivered changes in a way that alters the risks — for example if we ever introduced live sessions or any in-person element, which would require this policy to be rewritten rather than amended.

Questions about this policy, or anything about the course that is affecting your health or wellbeing: info@spaceeconomy.education. Please do not use this address for anything urgent or medical.