Author
Rosaria Califano, Iolanda Fiorillo & Alessandro Naddeo
Abstract
The COVID – 19 pandemics paralyzed the traditional “in presence” classes and obliged professors and students to organize their homes to make them suitable to provide and attend the online courses. The institutions quickly shifted to eLearning and provided online courses through several technological platforms and virtual classes. Students organized their home-workstation to recreate a comfortable learning environment. This closure led to solving several problems, such as adapting complex/traditional lessons in eLearning format even though problems with Wi-Fi connections. A published survey among Italian academic staff and students allowed to identify and highlight the factors that affect ergonomics of a workstation (learning and teaching place), postural and environmental comfort and teaching/learning effectiveness. Based on these factors, students’ most popular workstation layouts were identified through a previous experiment with 32 students. In this paper, those layouts were deeply investigated, analysing in-depth effects on perceived (dis)comfort and learning effectiveness by considering anthropometric variability and body postures. Results showed that the best layout in terms of postural comfort, visual comfort and learning effectiveness is the one with laptop and notebook placed frontally.