Analyzing engineering education programs for course content on human factors and ergonomics

Human-centred design must be present during undergraduate engineering education to ensure graduates’ ability to meet ethical obligations safeguarding life, health, and public welfare. A pilot study of accredited Canadian engineering programs found Human Factors / Ergonomics (HFE)-content in only 14% of required courses. A complete survey of undergraduate engineering programs would likely find 20% incidence of HFE-content, however potential HFE keywords were discovered in 91%. This paper describes challenges to filtering courses with relevant HFE content while avoiding false positives. Published undergraduate course descriptions presented course content. Experts defined HFE relevant keywords, counted using MAXQDa software and in-house programs in Python and R, including their contexts without Artificial Intelligence. Manual review beyond automated keyboard counts, found certain keywords like “interface” to be problematic alone and others reliable (ergono*) but incomplete. This analysis reveals that potentially relevant keywords are insufficient indicators of HFE content. Limitations for other content evaluations are emphasized.