AN ACTIVE LEARNING IMPLEMENTATION TO ENHANCE CRITICAL THINKING IN COLLABORATIVE PRODUCT DESIGN EDUCATION

Concurrent Engineering lecture is focused on developing skills for fostering multi-disciplinary and collaborative work. This lecture is based on merging functional methods with Product Life-cycle Management strategies that support information and project management. One of the most relevant method for supporting multi criteria decision-making in product development processes is Quality Function Deployment (QFD), which is centred in the translation from customer requirements into technical requirements. Nevertheless, QFD is widely taught under traditional learning methods, that imply a low involvement-level by the students, leading to low motivation and preventing a proper analysis process. It affects quality of the decision derived from its analysis.

Since Flipped Learning (FL) enables a better use of the class time, allowing to strength the reasoning capabilities of the students and profiting the professor-student interaction, the aim of this article is describing the implementation of a Flipped Learning-based approach for teaching QFD in an undergraduate program of Product Design Engineering. The implementation implied the execution of a practical project that was traverse to the whole course and provided the inputs needed for the use of the QFD method by the students. The preparation of the FL approach was based on three key elements:
i) Development of support literature, manuals and templates related to the implementation of QFD.
ii) Development of a digital platform that eases the access to the support documentation.
iii) Development of an animated video that describes the procedural aspects of the QFD method.

The results of the implementation were based on the analysis of the quality of the conclusions reported by students after the QFD use. This analysis was complemented with an evaluation of the student's perception regarding the teaching and learning process, the tools used and their satisfaction. In general terms, the outcome can be summarised in an improvement on the appropriation of the method by the students, evidenced in the argumentation capability of the students. This FL approach for the QFD teaching, besides of improving the quality of the student's deliverable of the method and the practical project implementation, sets a starting point for further FL applications on product design engineering lectures.