Flipped manufacturing economy

In Professor Sophia Keil’s class on Manufacturing Management, offered by the Faculty of Business Administration and Engineering Management, teaching is being “turned upside down.” Since the beginning of the 2018 summer semester, the class / course has been experimenting with the “flipped classroom” method. Students work through the course material independently at home and apply what they’ve learned at the university. In addition to acquiring subject-specific knowledge, this approach is designed to help them further develop their social and communication skills (particularly communication skills, the ability to cooperate, the ability to integrate, teamwork skills, the willingness to experiment, and verbal fluency). In this article, you’ll learn how this currently works and what trends are emerging.

To ensure that students’ learning is goal-oriented, industry leaders and faculty members at our university provide ongoing guidance and practical examples of current topics such as Failure Mode and Effects Analysis (FMEA), time management, decision-making using dashboards, and design thinking as part of subject-specific sessions in the form of coaching. Students then work in groups to develop content related to specified methods of production optimization in order to learn how to improve the strategic metrics of cost, time, and quality in manufacturing.

The goal is for students to present their results to their fellow students and the module coordinator in the form of a presentation and a self-designed exercise during a colloquium. After a review by a jury, the results are revised as part of a learning loop. Subsequently, these topics are visualized in the form of explanatory videos following a video production workshop. Students are empowered to independently and autonomously familiarize themselves with topics using a scientific approach, learn them, and then teach them to others.

After the class / course concludes this summer, you’ll learn in the next article how the students responded to the method and what conclusions the module coordinators have drawn.

The “Manufacturing Management” class / course is organized by the “Learning to Learn” project of the Career Services and the Public Relations Office at Zittau/Görlitz University of Applied Sciences.