Teacher's guide for Conceptualising people as integral elements in system design

by Yvonne Toft

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Introduction

Use this Concept Builder to help university level engineering and interdisciplinary students learn about human centred system design. The goal is to get engineering educators and students to develop new concepts about the necessity of considering humans as integral elements in a system.

Overview

Main Topic:	Human centred system design
Subtopics:	people are all sizes, people have expectations, people skills can be optimised through effective job design, people revert to stereotypical actions in emergencies
Grade Level:	University
Subject(s):	Interdisciplinary
Learning Goal:	developing new concepts

Vision and Reality

If the learning goal were achieved in the most ideal of perfect worlds it would look something like:

Engineering educators will understand and champion the human element in system design. The educators will feel motivated to work through the activities together with others or on their own but will also find it exciting to consider the possibility of integrating the activities into their own class rooms to help their students gain some foundation knowledge in human factors. The learning activities might also be used in a workshop format at the next educator's conference.

However, what I anticipate probably looks more like:

Based on the Vision set for this activity, the actual reality is more likely to be that the educators will only engage if the activities require a short time to complete and have maximum punch. The activities will need to be very usable for students without much tinkering for the educators to use them in that way.

The What - If Inventory

To give the activity its best chance at helping students learn, I assembled this list of possible resources:

Technology Resources

This concept builder will require individual participant access to LAN or broadband internet capable computers. Ideally the participants would be able to cut and paste into word processing software on the same computer. Access via modem can be successful with a little patience. Access to a common discussion board / blogg or other will be required if there is no opportunity for participants to debrief face to face.



Internet Potential

There is lots of potential for extending the learning activities with current events. On line news reports have huge potential for presenting multimedia catalyst material for helping participants understand their need to learn about this. Take time to explore the potential of How Stuff Works and Bad Human Factors Design pages to further supplement learning.



Possible Collaborations

The Human Factors and Ergonomics Society of Australia has a very active ergonomics community who would love to collaborate. If you would like to bounce ideas off the 'real world' then visit http://www.ergonomics.org.au/erginfomail.htm and subscribe to one of the email lists.



Special Events

AaeE conference, HFESA conference and CRC Centre for Integrated Engineering Asset Management workshops are all coming up in 2005. Contact the author for more information.



General Resources

End user resources are likely to be LAN / library electronic resources. A variety of software capability and understanding / experience of learning opportunities via the web.



Standards

These learning activities are congruent with engineering professional competency standards & HB59 The Human Factor (Australian Standards Association).

Conclusion

This activity will be used in an Educator's workshop format and as an activity offered on line through our BlackBoard learning management system for students. When facilitating via the latter students will be debriefed using a discussion boards within the same learning environment.

created by Yvonne Toft email: y.toft@cqu.edu.au http://web-and-flow.com/members/ytoft/ergoeng/builder.htm