The nature of human work is changing. With its expertise in competence-based training and assessment, the Research Studio Pervasive Computing Applications is taking the first steps towards meeting the new challenges in training and future working environments.
Digitization and automation bring about significant changes in the working environment and work tasks. The challenge of training in the future will be to prepare workers for jobs and jobs that do not yet exist.
Machines and robots will be able to perform routine and repetitive tasks in the future. Skills related to human factors such as communication, decision making and teamwork will be more in demand by human workers.
These changes require a rethink in education and training. The ability to perform routine tasks reliably will fade into the background. Traditional teaching methods will have to be redesigned to specifically support the new approaches of knowledge transfer, creativity and unconventional thinking.
The principles of Competency-based Training and Assessment (CBTA) represent such a rethink, which helps to improve non-routine learning and produce “adaptive experts”.
Current projects from the Research Studio PCA, such as the recently launched project MInd-Map, focus on competence-based training support systems, for example in the training of female pilots. Communication, decision making, workload management, situation awareness, teamwork and leadership come to the fore here.
The development of multi-sensor-based technologies enables direct feedback of the trainee’s attention, cognitive load and perception to instructors. Training recommendations based on this information aim to increase the quality and efficiency of training.
A generalized implementation approach shall enable the transfer of the developed methods to other application areas of training in order to exploit the enormous potential and the scaling factor of the CBTA principles and thus to adapt the training of various areas to future work requirements in the best possible way.