Development of evaluation tools for learning factories in manufacturing education

Evaluation tools for learning factories in manufacturing education are scarce and there is lack of research in this field. Simulations used as a learning approach have long traditions in many different educational fields as well as manufacturing education. Learning factories is one of these approaches. Nursing education has also focused on development of evaluation tools for learning with use of simulations. The following article discusses possibility of transferring this knowledge to manufacturing education and developing adaptable evaluation tools for our context. A case study has been conducted where the aim was to learn how evaluation questionnaires used in nursing education could be applicable for learning factories. A group of master students attended a one-day workshop in Leanlab - learning factory. Three separate evaluation tools from nursing hospitals were used for self-evaluation. The students were also asked to meta-analyse the tools themselves. In the next phase a merged and revised beta-tool was tested on students as well as participants from industry. Another project, where development of a learning factory from scratch was the case, gave insight in connecting learning outcomes and learning activities in a learning factory, which then provided possibility to explore how to look at learning activities, learning outcomes and assessment in learning factories according to the theory of constructive alignment. The beta tool will be subject of further research for validation and revision but is shortly presented in this paper. Moreover, challenges in designing an evaluation tool for debriefing will be discussed.