A BLENDED LEARNING DIDACTIC MODEL FOR ERGONOMICS INSTRUCTION BASED ON STUDENTS PREFERRED LEARNING STYLES

Traditionally engineering education is predominately verbal, but many Practitioners of engineering courses have a preference for visual instruction. Ergonomics as a discipline is underpinned with a mix of engineering, science and psychological fundamental concepts as a back bone to evaluation and design orientated practice in industry. But higher order learning is often not achieved, if at all, in the classroom environment. Alternative approaches such as Problem Based Learning offers solutions to this problem but it is resource intensive and not always the most suitable option for distance and self directed learning. This presents the problem of informing instructional design for blended learning approaches targeting the acquisition of higher levels of learning specific to ergonomics skills. This paper presents results of an analysis of the learning styles of a group of Practitioners, who share a common Ergonomics Module, Ergonomics Foundations though, are from either of 2 different courses: Product Design & Technology and Health and Safety. The purpose of this work is to inform the structure and design of a training model for ergonomics instruction which meets the skills needs in industry while considering the preferential learning styles range of all the different practitioners of Ergonomics in question.