Bringing industry to the classroom through virtual reality: enhancing learning and the undergraduate experience

Abstract: The requirements of Industry 4.0 provide a new opportunity for universities. As it will lead to a substantial transformation of their educational programs and methods to enhance students’ skills and competencies required for a new labor market given the rapidly emerging industry changes. This called Fourth Industrial Revolution is based on cutting-edge technological tools and data collection. Motivating new and innovative ways to operate and transform processes. These new tools and innovative education strategies, using trailblazing technologies, in engineering programs can potentially transform our society for the better. Well oriented, these revolutionary transformations, supported by updated universities’ study programs, could lead to better and faster replies to global environmental, economic and social challenges the world had been facing during the last century. In this paper we present the last advances of a whole assessment method applied to an undergraduate industrial engineering program to measure the impact of virtual reality use for the enhancement of industrial processes in a set of eleven transversal student’s competencies, focused on the Fourth Industrial Revolution. The importance of measuring this impact is of the major relevance for the educational challenge of improving study programs; which plan to include front-line technologies to respond to the skill set required by Industry 4.0. Our measures were tested statistically and qualitatively in a class of statistical engineering with a group of students in their last semester of the industrial engineering program in the Tecnologico de Monterrey Mexico. The group was exposed to challenges related to the enhancement of industrial processes, these challenges were presented to the students; first traditionally using descriptions and 2D video films of the processes and in a second part using immersive 3D films. The results obtained were a positive impact on five of the set of eleven competencies, the statistical validation was made using traditional hypotheses tests. We also added a qualitative measure by means of a survey opinion pool, which showed the great satisfaction of students experimenting with virtual reality environments. This assessment method was iteratively applied and improved during the last three years. This closes the experience of measuring the impact of the use of virtual reality environments to enhance industrial processes on relevant competencies regarding Industry 4.0. We present the last achievements related to tests, rubrics and results. We have added a direct evaluation on competencies which complement our previous attempts and experiences.

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