Learning Factory Application in Project-Based Courses: Framework and Results Assessment

Learning Factories’ primary objectives include education employing highly contextualized training. Therefore, Learning Factories may be applied in various ways, as detailed in the Learning Factory Morphology Dimension “Didactics”. Although Learning Factories have been intensively applied for educational purposes, assessing the learning outcomes and effectiveness needs further investigation. This work aims to evaluate the learning outcomes of a Learning Factory application. Therefore, six engineering and design undergraduate courses that applied a Learning Factory with different approaches and types of training have been studied. In one of the courses based on project work, the results of 42 groups of students were assessed and compared. The assessment of the student groups’ project outcomes indicates a higher level of requirements understanding, prototyping, and testing activities performed by groups that applied the Learning Factory. Moreover, the analysis of the instructors’ mode applied to the Learning Factory in the six courses indicated more detailed use types for the “project work” category of the Learning Factory Morphology Dimension “Didactics”. This work contributes to the Learning Factory’s body of knowledge by providing a more detailed understanding of the learning outcomes. Moreover, it expands the “type of training” category of the Learning Factory Morphology Dimension “Didactics”.