Road Traffic Safety Problem Based Learning Module

Abstract: Road traffic safety has increasingly become in need of educated road safety professionals, as the number of accidents in the World Health Organization member countries exceeds one million. The profession itself is transitioning from experience based decision making to empirical, theoretical and mathematical based solutions. However, road traffic safety is a multidiscipline, crossing over many fields and requiring a high degree of communication between different institutions. There are very few institutions that provide programs in the field; furthermore, they employ traditional lecture-based teaching methods. The traditional teaching environment does not fulfill the educational needs of future traffic safety professionals due to its rigidity and lack of problem solving exercises. An alternative method, namely problem based learning, is recommended as an alternative teaching method in this paper. The thesis is constructed in such a way as to develop a complete road traffic safety educational module at graduate and post graduate level. The theoretical basis on which a road traffic safety module is later built is presented in the first part of the thesis. Major concepts in road traffic safety, as well as problem based learning methods are investigated. In addition, a literature review SWOT analysis based on literature is conducted.The module development consists of establishing the road traffic safety learning goals for each segment in the module, appropriate assessment criteria and group work format. The module contains gradual difficulty level problems, starting from the easiest topic and easiest format (closed ended problem) and ending with the hardest topic and hardest format (open ended problem). The last section employs the SWOT analysis findings in the theoretical section to develop a SWOT analysis of the road traffic safety module presented in the thesis.