Is a Remote Laboratory a Means to Develop Competences for the ‘Working World 4.0’? A Brief Tentative Reality Check of Learning Objectives

The demands of so-called Industry 4.0 are reshaping the working world of future engineers. Therefore, it is very likely that these technological developments soon will affect higher education institutions with increasing intensity. For years, there has been a vivid discussion on the respective competence students would need to develop in order to face emerging technology changes. To slightly tackle this question of what might be expected of future engineers, a German technical university analyzes one of its remote labs to identify technological potential for future-oriented teaching and learning in light of the required competences for the `Working World 4.0'. In a first step, based on current scientific studies, relevant Industry 4.0 competences are identified and summarized in a structuring grid. In a second step, the selected remote laboratory is analyzed as an example case with regard to explicit and implicit learning objectives, which address the identified competence requirements of the structuring grid. It could be shown that this didactic setting has the potential to recognize the complexity of the Working World 4.0 and 'digitization' in the form of a remote laboratory, opening up a multitude of possibilities. However, the results also show that in the examined case example laboratory only a few competences of the technical competence area are addressed in the context of Industry 4.0, since the lack of interdisciplinarity significantly limits the promotion of these competences. This shows possibilities for future critical research and constructive development in this area.