The Teaching Factory Network: A new collaborative paradigm for manufacturing education

摘要

The Teaching Factory (TF) has emerged as a promising paradigm for manufacturing education. It operates as a non-geographically anchored learning “space” interconnecting remotely located engineering and student teams that work together on real-life projects. The paper will introduce the concept of the Teaching Factory Network (TFN), namely a large-scale implementation of the TF paradigm within a network of academic and industrial organizations. Following an overview of the key challenges associated with manufacturing education today, the foundation of this work, namely the concept of the TF paradigm will be shortly presented. On that basis, the paper will define the TFN concept, specify the TFN learning delivery hub, namely the software platform facilitating TFN operations, and discuss implementation aspects.