Practising in the virtual factory
On 4 May, ETH Zurich is presenting the KITE Award to honour particularly innovative teaching projects and initiatives. In a short series, we present the three projects that made it to the final. All of them were created in the semesters of distance learning.
During the coronavirus pandemic, one online lecture followed another and students often spent the entire day on video calls. Their own rooms became lecture theatres, blurring the boundary between study and free time. Many students complained of physical exhaustion, emotional emptiness and monotony.
“We wanted to offer students a totally different online learning experience,” says ETH Professor Torbjørn Netland. When the pandemic hit, his team collaborated on the development of a new online concept for the introductory course on Production and Operations Management (POM).
Video lecture replaces online lectures
What is Industry 4.0? What are the advantages of Toyota’s production system? And what does just-in-time production mean? Over the course of 44 five- to ten-minute tutorials, Netland and his team set out to explain the most important concepts and principles in production management.
“Our goal was to produce informative, entertaining and lively videos that students enjoy watching,” says Netland. To do so, his team recorded short lectures interlaced with questions, pop-up graphics, audiovisual elements and a good pinch of humour. The team had technical support from Katalin Tesch, a video producer at Netland’s group.
Rather than recording a 90-minute lecture, Netland and his colleagues published three to five videos on Moodle every week, supplemented with texts to reinforce the material. Every two weeks, the students met up live via Zoom to compete against each other in a quiz about the material presented in the videos. The winners received a packet of POM-bear crisps and an item of official ETH merchandise they could collect from Netland’s office. During and after the quiz, Netland was on hand to answer questions personally and elaborate on any of the questions the students had difficulties with.
Virtual factory visit
The best way for anyone to understand how a production system works, is to visit one in person. Even under normal circumstances, it was tricky to organise a visit – and practically impossible during the pandemic. “So we decided to use virtual reality (VR) to bring the factory to the students,” Netland explains.
With the help of Innovedum funding for his “FactoryVR” project, his team produced the VR content by themselves. Using cheap VR goggles and a smartphone or computer, students can visit real factories operated by the company Hilti. They can take a virtual tour through the production halls and solve realistic production problems at different stations. They win points for doing so, just like a video game.
These experiences formed the basis for one of t wo marked group exercises. Here, the students worked in groups of four using VR to check how well businesses like Hilti implement the principles of Lean Management or how production could be organised more efficiently. They wrote up their findings in a graded report and presented their solutions in a flipped classroom design in weeks between quizzes.
Innovation in Learning and Teaching Fair
This years’ KITE Award will be presented at the first Innovation in Learning and Teaching Fair on 4 May. This new event brings together two former events: the Learning and Teaching Fair, where ETH lecturers exchange innovative teaching ideas and projects, and the KITE Award, a prize conferred every two years by the Lecturers’ Conference to honour outstanding teaching innovations.
Registration KITE Award ceremony: www.ethz.ch/kite-registration
Detailed descriptions of all projects of the Fair: teachingfair.ethz.ch