INTEGRATION OF LEARNING AND RESEARCH IN A MULTI-PERSPECTIVE LEARNING FACTORY

Many technical universities and polytechnics have manufacturing environments or learning factories to teach students about production and assembly processes. The University of Twente currently establishes a new workshop, including a specific learning factory. In this learning factory, design choices are made in such a way that the organisation, appearance and comportment of the learning factory can be harmonised with the learning intent, the learning path and the levels of experience and expertise of the learners or trainees involved. The learning factory serves different levels of learning simultaneously. To this end, a recursive master-apprentice model is ingrained in its design. This approach aids in implicitly blurring the distinction between ‘learning’ and ‘research’. Although all participants have their own interests and goals, they strengthen each other’s learning and research. The learning factory caters for addressing multiple perspectives simultaneously, ranging from e.g., a production process and quality monitoring, via logistics and real-time location systems to workplace ergonomics. This is only possible if a flexible and versatile architecture underpins the learning factory, based on serious gaming and digital twinning. In the learning factory, research initiatives thrive on the activities of learners; concurrently, learners benefit from the research initiatives and underlying systems – interfaced by e.g., serious games and digital twinning. The learning factory is under development, in which the paradigms of the learning factory are applied: it is infused by students and researchers working on prototype projects/solutions; this allows them to study the topics involved, while anticipating the structure and working of the learning factory in a way that vouches for the envisaged openness, flexibility, and manageable indeterminacy.