Closing Competency Gaps In Manufacturing Through Student Learning Factories One Approach

In the traditional model of manufacturing education, the manufacturing processes course has been offered with a lab component while other manufacturing related courses are offered as lecture only. Linkage between courses is often not implemented in the curricula. A second issue is the growing movement towards closing competency gaps that have been identified by educators and industry. This paper discusses an approach being taken at Marquette University to help close competency gaps and incorporate a higher level of horizontal integration between manufacturing courses using the Learning Factory approach. Rather than limiting usage of the manufacturing lab to one course, it instead forms an integrated environment for hands-on learning across the manufacturing curriculum using a variety of manufacturing technologies. As one means of assessing this approach, the impact of the methodology is being measured using a quantitative index (ν-function) which was developed at Marquette University for measuring the quality of soft indices.