Design Paradigms for Workplace-Integrated Learning in the Smart Factory

The vision of smart factories as a modern self-organizing production plant redefines the role of production workers. Knowledge, know-how, experience and competencies of production workers become ever more important, making knowledge management and knowledge transfer key objectives for production companies. In this paper we present five different use cases from five different companies, motivating a set of design paradigms for the creation of technical systems for workplace-integrated learning in the smart factory. These design paradigms seek to generalize the solution design for each of the five use cases. We find them to be in line with literature and previous research findings, and valuable guidelines for the design and implementation of said systems.

I. Introduction

The use of educational technology in corporate contexts originated from distance education, where cost reduction and efficient delivery of educational content was a main driver [1]. Detached from educational technology research, knowledge management has evolved as its own research discipline in the early 1990s [2]. The independent origins of these two fields can still be observed through the way many companies have implemented their respective solutions. E-learning is used to distribute course material that is either centrally produced or even produced by external training companies, while work related documents are stored on share point servers or similar solutions to manage company knowledge. As part of a project funded by the Austrian Research Promotion Agency as part of the Digital Pro Bootcamps program, we explored the situations in 6 different companies, 5 of which we will present in this paper. We found that the traditional e-learning paradigms implemented in most companies struggle to deliver procedural knowledge efficiently, capture tacit knowledge within the company and accomplish ongoing knowledge transfer. We argue that it is necessary to embed learning and knowledge management into daily work. Based upon this argument we follow a design science approach as described by [3],[4] and apply the research process guidelines by [5]. In this paper we describe the initial situation, the involved design artifacts, the five specific use cases that informed our design and the formalized design paradigms that we infer for technological solutions for workplace-integrated learning in the smart factory.