Learning Factory: Industry-Partnered Active Learning, The

Journal of Engineering Education, Jan 2008 by Lamancusa, John S, Zayas, Jose L, Soyster, Allen L, Morell, Lueny, Jorgensen, Jens

ABSTRACT

On February 21, 2006, the National Academy of Engineering recognized the achievements of the Learning Factory with the Bernard M. Gordon Prize for Innovation in Engineering and Technology Education. The co-founders were commended "for creating the Learning Factory, where multidisciplinary student teams develop engineering leadership skills by working with industry to solve real-world problems." This paper describes the origins, motivation, philosophy, and implementation of the Learning Factory.

The specific innovations of the Learning Factory partnership were: active learning facilities, called Learning Factories, that provide experiential reinforcement of engineering science, and a realization of its limitations; strong collaborations with industry through advisory boards, engineers in the classroom, and industry-sponsored capstone design projects; practice-based engineering courses integrating analytical and theoretical knowledge with manufacturing, design, business concepts, and professional skills; and dissemination to other academic institutions (domestic and international), government and industry.

I. MOTIVATION FOR THE LEARNING FACTORY

Prior to 1950, the practical arts dominated engineering curricula. The emphasis was on producing graduates who could be immediately useful to industry. In addition to foundational studies in Physics and Calculus, students developed visualization and graphical skills on the drafting board. They acquired direct knowledge of materials in foundries, machine shops, and test laboratories. They took field trips to factories, chemical works, and power plants. Calculations were done on slide rules and required a "back-of-the-envelope" reality check The results helped to develop a deeper conceptual and intuitive understanding of the behavior of systems and machines.

The publication of the Grinter Report (Grinter, 1956) and the launch of Sputnik in 1957 are widely acknowledged to have caused a major transformation of U.S. engineering education. The traditional engineering handbooks were discarded and engineering curricula became more abstract with an emphasis on calculus and science. Expanding enrollments and shrinking budgets made mass lectures more attractive, and hands-on labs less so. The availability of powerful computer simulation tools and low cost computers held out the false promise of "no prototypes." During this same period, there was a dramatic increase in federal funds available for research, without a commensurate expansion of infrastructure. As a result, many of the hands-on shops and traditional labs were re-assigned to research programs, or became generic computer labs. The combined effect of these influences was that students spent far less time "doing" engineering, and depended far more on the computer for even the most routine estimates.

On the occasion of the centennial of the American Society of Engineering Education (ASEE), Lawrence Grayson made the following observation (Grayson, 1993):

. . . the 1960's were the "Golden Age" for research universities. Federal support for academic research more than quadrupled over a period of eight years . . . . The number of faculty involved in engineering research grew steadily, even as enrollments and degrees were stable. The physical plant of universities expanded as new research facilities were built to house laboratories, equipment, professors, and graduate students. Teaching of graduate and undergraduate classes became a smaller proportion of the professors' responsibilities as they "bought" research time from their schedules with research grant funds . . . . the deemphasis in teaching was in direct opposition to what the Society had been advocating for over half a century-that more, rather than less, attention should be directed toward improving engineering teaching. Continually increasing government funding through the present has continued to skew the emphasis between teaching and research toward research.

Today, there is an evolving consensus that universities need to strike a better balance between engineering science and engineering practice. There is a strong interest in improving engineering education for a variety of reasons, some of which are described below.

Students Want to Do Engineering: Students yearn for direct, first-hand experiences; not a professor's narration of the textbook or powerpoint slides. Students lack the real life experiences needed to make sense of complex technical concepts. Compared to previous generations, far fewer have tinkered with cars or ham radios, or grew up on a farm. Lacking context, the professor's message, no matter how well intentioned or eloquently projected, has few physical foundations upon which to attach. The primary methods of teaching engineering include passive lectures and recipe labs that require little processing, emotional involvement or imagination on the students' part. In the desire to prepare students for every contingency that they may encounter in their careers, we run the risk of overwhelming them with facts on a superficial level, at the expense of deep understanding and transferance. Since it is not possible in four years to teach students everything they will need to know, the ability to acquire new knowledge is the most important outcome for a successful engineering career. The "doing of engineering" on meaningful problems, can motivate students to learn the difficult fundamentals, in ways that are remembered long after the semester is over.