All Courses
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IOE 437 001 FA 2018
This course provides an overview of human factors and driving to help engineers design motor vehicles that are safe and easy to use, and to provide basic knowledge for those interested in conducting automotive human factors/ergonomics research. The focus is on the total vehicle (all aspects of vehicle design) and for an international market. Key topics include design guidelines, crash investigation and statistics, driving performance measures, vehicle dynamics, automated vehicles, occupant packaging, and driver vision.
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ENVIRON 305 004 FA 2018
The Great Lakes region includes the 5 Great Lakes and a bi-national political boundary that includes parts of eight US states and Canada. It is an economically important region, with seven major cities and is home to over 30 million people. It has extreme variability in land use and human impacts, from pristine, wildland ecosystems in the north to completely human-dominated landscapes of industrial agriculture in the south, with fragmented forests and rural landscapes in between. In this course, students will learn to examine complexities, tradeoffs, and joint goals and outcomes for sustainability issues using critical thinking and efforts to understand multiple perspectives. This course will use a case-study approach. Rather than learning general principles about a single discipline, we will undertake an in-depth analysis of a discrete number of specific cases that are chosen to represent the range of real-world ‘wicked’ environmental issues in the Great Lakes region. Wicked issues are those that cross disciplines, cross cultures, cross ecosystems and scales, and that have multiple types of stakeholders that often do not agree on the definition of the problem. Each case is a real-world issue that involves tradeoffs and multiple layers of complexity that will require us to draw from a range of disciplines and perspectives. We will draw on a range of disciplines as needed to understand each case, including environmental sciences, economics and finance, jobs, public policy and regulation at multiple levels of government, legal issues, political aspects, and cultural aspects. We will begin the course with a brief overview of the goals of sustainability science, the definition of wicked problems, and an explanation of the case study approach and how it differs from teaching and learning in a traditional disciplinary approach. On the first day of class we will also cover the class assignments. We will then move immediately into the case studies. We will cover 8 case studies during the term, most lasting three class sessions. Each case study will involve the following: (1) an introduction to the complexities of the case study by the instructor using Powerpoint slides; (2) in-class activities and discussion in which students are expected to actively participate; and (3) a guest speaker or guest discussant who is knowledgeable about the particular case. In some cases, students may be asked to briefly explain to the class their web-based research and blog posts.