Abstract
Curriculum reviews are performed to provide grounds for adjustments necessary due to changes in student enrollment, teaching faculty, and goals and objectives of programs that have a substantial human factors component. This task is arguably quite difficult due to the very broad spectrum of the human factors discipline and lack of widely accepted standards or criteria for education in human factors. This paper describes a framework for review of undergraduate human factors curricula using the program at the University of Illinois as an example. The framework was implemented as a hierarchical relational database with a web interface. Populated with either existing curriculum or desired courses to be developed it allows for rapid analysis of overlap between individual courses, missing important human factors topics, and determination prerequisite knowledge for these, and a rigorous and formal way of keeping human factors curricula aligned with explicitly stated goals for the programs.
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