USING ONLINE TRAINING WITH SERIOUS GAMES/VIRTUAL REALITY FOR SAFETY TRAINING IN THE CONSTRUCTION SECTOR

Construction is an important sector in many countries and a key driver of growth. Despite the challenges the sector has recently faced, construction continues to be one of the largest sectors and a large employer. The global construction market, however, faces major transformation as businesses continue to respond to the challenges of the economic crisis since 2008 and seek to take advantage of the opportunities provided by the digital economy. As with many sectors, a skilled and flexible workforce is key to the construction sector's performance and competitiveness. One particular issue with the sector is health and safety and although safety performance has improved significantly in the past century, the industry is facing difficulties to further improve its performance while injuries and fatalities still happen regularly and a large number of construction accidents are caused by human factors associated with workers' actions, behavioural traits and competency. Education and training play an important role in reducing health and safety accidents. However, in the UK a recent report from the UK's Department for Business Innovation & Growth suggests that a lower proportion of firms in construction have established training plans than in other sectors on average and training among self-employed is low. This paper discusses the development of an online safety course associated with the construction of towers/scaffolding. It evaluates the online training compared to an established face-to-face safety training course. While part of the face-to-face course aims to provide theoretical knowledge and skills for tower construction, the course also has a practical element that takes learners through actually building a tower and the type of problems that can occur. To simulate the practical aspects of the face-to-face training course, the online course incorporated a serious game that allowed trainees to experience (in a virtual way) how to construct a tower. In this paper, we evaluate the online course and the serious game for the construction industry to help learners understand how to build tower scaffolds and the issues associated with health and safety. The findings show that the online safety course has been found to be very useful and provides flexibility that the face-to-face course does not provide. In particular, the findings indicate the popularity of the serious game and its contribution to learning. The paper provides recommendations for future development in training in the construction sector using serious games and a future extension that incorporates Virtual Reality.