Undergraduate Human Factors: Challenges and Opportunities

Abstract

Teaching undergraduate human factors provides challenges in developing an appropriate course, providing material to students with varying backgrounds and preparation, offering examples with which students can identify, and keeping students engaged in large (i.e., 150 students) courses. Means to overcome these challenges include evaluating the type of institution where the course is taught and the level of student preparation, identifying current and relevant examples for demonstrations or projects, and engaging the students to help them understand the application of human factors to their own lives. The benefits of successfully teaching undergraduate human factors includes introducing students to the field and application of HFE to their own lives, as well as building a pipeline for HFE graduate education.

Teaching undergraduate human factors and ergonomics (HFE) courses provides an opportunity to expose students to the field of HFE (e.g., Haight & Alexander, 2018; Stone & Moroney, 1998), to educate a broader audience (i.e., students from a variety of majors), and to assist in building a pipeline for HFE graduate education. There are articles on applying HFE to educational systems in general (e.g., Smith, 2007) or even other disciplines such as patient safety (Williams et al., 2012), as well as on specific techniques to enhance the learning experience in HFE courses. For example, some techniques that enhance undergraduate HFE education include peer mentoring (Rickel et al., 2022), capstone courses (Tossell et al., 2019), participating in a design competition (Haight & Alexander, 2018), and research (Elliott, 2013; Fyock et al., 2018) and applied (Lum et al., 2019) experiences.

The implementation of some teaching techniques might not be as feasible or effective depending on the educational landscape across academic institutions (e.g., funding, the ubiquity of AI, student characteristics, access to experiential learning activities). Therefore, universities must consider the costs of developing undergraduate HFE courses when such courses do not exist (especially in departments that do not provide HFE graduate education). For current undergraduate HFE courses, there are often challenges due to what the backgrounds are of the students (e.g., psychology, engineering), the academic preparation of the students (e.g., mean ACT/SAT) and prerequisite courses, funding availability for various applied experiences, and the access to or availability of applied experiences.

Therefore, to enhance the delivery of undergraduate human factors courses, the panelists provide examples of specific challenges related to the development of an undergraduate HFE course, as well as challenges faced when offering undergraduate HFE courses. In turn, the panelists provide means to overcome these obstacles for the benefit of student learning and the opportunities that teaching an undergraduate HFE course provides.

Challenges and Opportunites

Joshua Shive, Ph.D. is a Professor of Psychology and Interim Chair at Tennessee State University and considering the development of a new course in HF. Developing any new course requires hundreds of small choices. Some of these are familiar to educators: developing a course’s student learning objectives, choosing assessments that match the learning objectives, and selecting which topics to cover. However, because of the interdisciplinary nature of human factors, introductory courses in the field carry additional considerations that course designers should consider. Dr. Shive provides examples from a human factors course he is designing for their undergraduate psychology program, and describes how institutional and student factors should be considered in course design.

First, consider university-level and departmental needs. Dr. Shive teaches courses in the Department of Psychological Sciences and Counseling at Tennessee State University, a public university in Nashville, Tennessee. His department offers a bachelor’s degree in psychology, master’s degrees in Clinical Mental Health Counseling and Professional School Counseling, and a Ph.D. in Counseling Psychology. Although the university offers undergraduate and graduate degrees in engineering, the only existing human factors course is an upper-division undergraduate course that is part of the aeronautical engineering program. Thus, there is an opportunity for an introductory course in human factors that students from a variety of majors could take.

For these reasons, he decided to design an undergraduate human factors course as an upper-division elective in the Department of Psychology. This allows any student in the university who has taken their department’s introductory psychology class to take the human factors course. Faculty in departments other than psychology may find it more useful to create discipline-specific introductory courses with more specific titles (e.g., User Experience, User-Centered Design, Ergonomics) that fit better with departmental needs and faculty preparation to teach (e.g., having taken a similar course in graduate school).

Next, consider students’ level of preparation. Courses in human factors may differ in the amount and level of quantitative content that the instructor wishes to include, as well as whether the instructor chooses to include a major course project. In considering both factors, instructors should consider students’ level of preparation.

Quantitative descriptions of behavior (e.g., Fitts’ Law, signal detection theory, Weber’s Law) are an important part of human factors science and practice. Instructors should think carefully before deciding to require a mathematics prerequisite for a human factors course. In designing the undergraduate human factors course for the department, he will not include a mathematics prerequisite. First, the course is an elective that will be taken by a variety of students across the university, rather than a core class for majors only. Thus, he would prefer to provide some mathematical background in the course instead of assuming that all students have it when they enter the course. Second, each additional course prerequisite diminishes the number of students who will be eligible to take the course each semester. Because the course is designed to introduce human factors to students from a variety of disciplines across the institution, additional prerequisites will add barriers to taking the course.

Finally, undergraduate courses often have major products (such as papers or projects) that students work on over the course of the semester. Because human factors specialists and engineers often interact with designs in a variety of ways—proposing them, evaluating them, testing them with users—instructors may be interested in having students complete a major course product that involves proposing a new design or assessing an existing one. Instructors and course designers should consider student preparation in deciding what types of course products are likely to succeed and whether to have students work alone or in teams. For example, students may have existing skills in prototyping, research design, or coding that may be useful in working on a project. However, these skills are likely to differ from student to student. Thus, it may not be possible for one course product to fit all students. In the course Dr. Shive is designing, he initially plans to allow students to choose their own final course product from several options. However, after each semester, he plans to make adjustments to this course component to incorporate student feedback and his own observations to improve this assignment.

In conclusion, course design in human factors will benefit from careful consideration of the course’s place within a department as well as in the larger institution. Furthermore, instructors should think about student preparation in considering course prerequisites and assessments.

Gabriella M. Hancock, Ph.D. is an Associate Professor of Psychology and Director of the Stress and Technology Applied Research (STAR) Laboratory at California State University, Long Beach. She teaches introductory HF, an upper-division elective. Dr. Hancock will address the benefits of a diverse composition (mostly psychology, but also kinesiology, engineering, economics, communication, and human development majors) that highlights the multidisciplinary nature of HF, and the challenge of teaching to wide-ranging knowledge levels.

Bridging the gaps between disciplines and knowledge levels is particularly challenging given the wide variability in these factors, limited class time, and the need to balance breadth and depth in the instruction of the material. Fortunately, human factors’ inherently multidisciplinary nature makes this uphill climb less steep than it would perhaps be for other fields, much to the benefit of both the instructor and the students. The wide applicability of our field means that, as an instructor, one can always find relevant ties to interdisciplinary interests. For example, elucidating on the economic or market impact of launching poorly designed systems for economics majors; discussing how human factors caters to the cognitive and physical capacities of people in the design of systems, but how these abilities can change over the course of the lifespan for human development students; and emphasizing to engineering scholars that systems need to not only work (usability), but they need to be operated by a person whose perceptions (user experience) can influence all outcomes of that system. An instructor can therefore convey and emphasize relevant HF material through myriad, targeted examples of practical applications of ergonomic concepts at play in everyday human-machine systems.

Dr. Hancock overcomes her challenges with (1) the use of readily available current news developments, and (2) hands-on analysis of freely available resources. For example, when discussing the capabilities, strengths, and limitations of artificial intelligence systems, Dr. Hancock will recommend that students give the free, limited access version of ChatGPT a prompt, and then evaluate the accuracy of its response and actively revise and correct its output using peer-reviewed research. Students therefore gain hands-on experience with cutting-edge technology, but with a more accurate understanding of what it is doing, how it is producing such output, and how therefore to appropriately calibrate their trust in the quality of work produced by AI.

Finally, another particular success is the application of concepts and theories to real-world applications, namely historical case studies that illustrate the contributions of human factors to system successes and failures. Students learn from said failures to design safer systems. Case studies are drawn from maritime, aviation, aeronautics, mining, and architectural sources, spanning both 20th and 21st centuries, illustrating iterative design and learning from failure. Students synthesize their knowledge of the material covered over the course of the class (e.g., anthropometrics, human-computer interaction, automation, safety, and human error, etc.) and see how concepts from all of these areas combine to create real-world outcomes of great failure or success. For example, how stellar cockpit resource management, dynamics, teamwork, airplane design, interface design, safety equipment, and communications all contributed to minimal injuries and no single loss of life in the most successful emergency ditching and evacuation in aviation history with US Flight 1549, “The Miracle on the Hudson.”

Alex Chaparro, Ph.D. is a Professor of Psychology at Embry Riddle Aeronautical University. He has taught human factors for over 25 years to graduate and undergraduate students. One challenge of teaching human factors is that examples in many of the textbooks are often drawn from domains that many students lack any experience with such as industrial, aviation, and the military. Dr. Chaparro provides examples for demonstrating the relevance of human factors to a range of real-world problems and issues that students can relate to.

Dr. Chaparro discusses how instructors can use compelling examples drawn from their life experience and interaction with technology to illustrate the application of human factors principles, techniques, and methods. For instance, most students drive or have flown on a commercial airliner which provides many useful examples of the application of human factors to a multitude of issues. The topic of driving allows instructors to leverage the students’ own experience and insight to explore important topics such as the design and evaluation of road signage, the effects of multitasking and distraction on driver attention and motor performance, the development of automaticity, driver monitoring, driver behavior, workload, error, ergonomics, aging, training, and designing for special populations. Similarly, experience with commercial air travel can be used as an entry to discuss human inspection performance, error, vigilance, effects of fatigue, and signal detection theory, as they relate to TSA (Transportation Security Administration).

The choice of examples and class projects also allows instructors to highlight the scientific basis of human factors including the value and importance of our methodological techniques to arrive at solutions that aid users

Heather Lum, Ph.D. is an Assistant Professor in Human Systems Engineering and Director of the Virtual Environments and Cognitive Training Research (VECToR) Laboratory at Arizona State University. Dr. Lum’s challenge is keeping 150 students, most are taking the course as a required elective, engaged in such a large room. It is essential that she instructs with active exercise practices to keep their attention. This also gives her the opportunity to use the examples that relate to the needs and issues that students are facing so that they can visualize how and where human factors applies to their daily lives. Therefore, Dr. Lum discusses how undergraduate human factors instruction differs across different types of institutions: from large to small schools and between engineering and human factors focused versus more liberal arts focused schools.

For the majority of Dr. Lum’s teaching career, she was the only human factors professor at her university. It was a primarily undergraduate teaching school with smaller class sizes and a diversity of majors and types of students taking her classes. Most of the students taking her introductory and related human factors classes had no idea what HFE was, much less how it applied to them. She saw this as both a challenge as well as an opportunity. It allowed her to use active and applied teaching strategies to engage with the students. Examples included using miracle fruit to teach about sensory experiences and the difference between sensation and perception. It allowed her to teach about signal detection theory by having students watch a demonstration of Dr. Lum’s search dog locating a missing person. She was able to really dig into the everyday examples that students experienced with affordances and how actual versus perceived affordances work. In summation, students were able to understand how human factors principles applied to their everyday lives as well as their specific major/discipline.

Then Dr. Lum moved to a large university. She found herself in a theater style lecture hall, teaching 150 students about what human factors is. Standing on a platform about 10 feet high looking out into the crowd, she wondered how she could bring the same level of instruction while also maintaining her sanity and protecting her time. She asked herself, “How can I provide quality assessment of the students’ learning without spending countless hours grading essays and other time-consuming content?” These questions kept her up at night during her first few weeks after moving to ASU.

But then she buckled down and found that many of the techniques that she employed at those smaller schools could still work with some tweaks. Dr. Lum had students in groups go out and walk around campus, looking for examples of good and poor designs. The students would post pictures of these designs in an online discussion board format so that a back-and-forth conversation could occur about what they saw and how it applied to what they were learning. The class also discussed it in person during the free thoughts portion of class. She utilized large sticky boards where students could write out their ideas and others could see what they were thinking. Although not easy, Dr. Lum still walked around the room while students were working in teams and ask Socratic type questions to get them to think more deeply about the topic.

There was definitely some trial and error involved with getting the types of activities that worked well in the smaller classes to fit the scale of a large class. Trying to incentivize students to come to class as well as take part in exercises is harder when the student feels like just another person in the crowd. Luckily, coming from a human factors background helped her to think critically about what the human needs, their limitations, and how to use the system to my advantage.

The moderator, Nancy J. Stone, Ph.D., Professor and Chair of Psychology at Middle Tennessee State University, established and taught an undergraduate human factors course at Creighton University and now teaches an undergraduate/graduate course in human factors at MTSU. Providing students with examples to which they relate can be challenging for those who have never flown, or psychology is the minor and students do not have as strong of a background in psychology as majors. Field trips to HF programs, an air traffic control tower, a local zoo, or a place such as the FAA’s Civil Aerospace Medical Institute (CAMI) can greatly enhance student learning and application of what they are studying.

Benefits of Teaching Undergraduate Human Factors

The benefits of teaching undergraduate human factors and ergonomics courses are the ability to expose more students to the HFE field, the application of HFE to the students’ lives, and the opportunity for students to learn the iterative process of design and how to create better designs. For a successful course, one needs to know the specific situation relative to course size (e.g., 20 vs. 150 students), student preparation and background, whether the course is an elective or required, and resources available. In addition, examples and demonstrations need to be real-world, but they also should be in domains that are familiar to the students. Therefore, challenges vary across institutions and courses such that teachers need to consider the material that will resonate with students and their experiences.

Students’ familiarity with HFE is influenced by whether there is an HFE graduate program. Therefore, teaching undergraduate HFE is our chance to help students enhance their own lives, as well as an opportunity to recruit to the discipline.