Pilot case Fagskolen i Viken: The Industry College

In 2019 The Industry College was developed as a joined project between The Federation of Norwegian Industries (Norsk Industri) and The United Federation of Trade Unions (Fellesforbundet). The course includes three modules of 10 ECT each, 30 ECT in total. The selected pilot in the TEFFIC project was the module “Agile Production”.

Agile Production as a course covers knowledge outcomes of logistics and communications, machine autonomy and robotics and material handling. The students learn skills of using 3D-modelling software and robotics programming tools. Overall competencies in this course include:

• Establishing relations to fellow professionals within the field of agile production and relevant external stakeholders such as government regulators.
• Act professionally in agile production to optimize resource spending and economic results based on a holistic perspective and ethical considerations.

The educational framework developed as a part of the TEFFIC project was presented to the three educators allocated to the Agile Production course. First, the educators were presented with written articles about the educational framework. Later, they used the provided e-learning course on our digital learning platform.

After the course finished, the students completed a survey measuring 4 KPIs. We concluded two surveys on different student groups. The first one in the spring of 2020 and the second in the autumn of 2020. The corona situation had an impact on both students and educators during the pilot case.

On a scale from 1 to 5 where 1 represents totally disagree and 5 represents totally agree the surveys had the following results:

KPI	Spring 2020	Autumn 2020
Compliance between experienced and announced learning content	4,2	3,5
Quality of learning processes	4,0	3,9
Perceived quality lectures and tutorials	3,5	3,6
Compliance between achieved learning outcome and the learning needs	3,7	3,9

The spring course was planned and partly completed as on campus training one day per week. Due to the corona situation the last third of the course was completed as online training according to the “flipped classroom” model complemented by synchronous tuition. The autumn course started with a physical convention of four days following online learning after a flipped classroom model. Another four days physical convention was planned by midterm, but this was replaced by an online convention with synchronous lectures and mentoring.

The evaluations show a 0,7-point drop in the experienced learning content versus the announced (towards the spring results). This may be attributed to a communication breach before training, as the content was the same.

The quality of the learning process is still reported as high, although there is a 0,1-point drop. This is within the error margin, so it may be deemed insignificant. The same is the case for the perceived quality of the lectures and tutorials, where there is a 0,1-point increase.

The compliance between achieved learning outcome and the learning needs have a 0,2-points increase. In general, the students give the quality of learning process a high score even though it to a large extent takes place online. The focus on authentic tasks, and the application of the other elements of the pedagogic framework, is attributed to this success.