Teaching Usability to Industrial Engineering Students
Industrial Engineers determine a better way to do things and work in varied professional areas, which includes Ergonomics. Usability is a key topic in Ergonomics, related with the effectiveness, efficiency and satisfaction of human-system interactions. Us
- PDF / 196,969 Bytes
- 8 Pages / 439.37 x 666.142 pts Page_size
- 29 Downloads / 207 Views
Abstract Industrial Engineers determine a better way to do things and work in varied professional areas, which includes Ergonomics. Usability is a key topic in Ergonomics, related with the effectiveness, efficiency and satisfaction of human-system interactions. Usability impacts companies’ productivity and economic success since, e.g. the occurrence of errors can lead to incidents and/or accidents; to do unnecessary operations increases the load and/or the gestures repetition, with potential for the development of work related musculoskeletal disorders; and users’ dissatisfaction can become a risk factor for the development of stress, with all the consequences associated with it. In this context the thematic of Usability was initiated in the Master program of Industrial Engineering. A learn-by-doing approach was introduced in order to assist students’ reach the defined learning outcomes. The paper offers some insights on the benefits of the adopted methodology, analyzes results of the last four years and discusses some observed trends. Keywords Learn-by-doing Student-centered learning
Human-system interaction Learning outcomes
I.L. Nunes (&) Faculty of Sciences and Technology, Universidade NOVA de Lisboa, 2829-516 Caparica, Portugal e-mail: [email protected] I.L. Nunes Universidade NOVA de Lisboa, 2829-516 Caparica, Portugal © Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2017 I.L. Nunes (ed.), Advances in Human Factors and System Interactions, Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing 497, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-41956-5_15
155
156
I.L. Nunes
1 Introduction Industrial Engineering (IE) is the engineering branch that deals with the design, improvement, installation, management and control of complex processes or systems (involving people, materials, information, equipment and energy). The Industrial Engineers work to eliminate waste that does not add value (e.g., time, money, materials, labor, machine time, energy), i.e. they engineer processes and systems to improve quality and productivity. In a simply way IE determine a better way to do things and work in a wide array of professional areas, including management, manufacturing, logistics, health systems, retail, service and ergonomics [1]. Taking in consideration the aforementioned ‘job description’ of Industrial Engineers, and recognizing the growing importance of information systems to EI, the topic of Usability has been considered an important competence for these professionals and included in the educational program of Industrial Engineering, ensuring an adequate set of learning outcomes in this field of Ergonomics to the future practitioners. The European Qualifications Framework [2] defines ‘learning outcomes’ as statements of what a student knows, understands and is able to do on completion of a learning process. The learning outcomes are defined in terms of knowledge, skills and competence: • knowledge—means the outcome of the assimilation of information through learning; • skills—means the ability to apply knowledge and use know-how to complete tasks
Data Loading...
