Proceedings for the European Conference on Reflective Practice-based Learning 2021 practice as an assignment. This activation of prior knowledge corresponds to the 1 st prin- ciple of RPL. Moreover, the assignment embedded in the pilot requires the students to follow an explorative approach while identifying the demonstrated phenomena within their respective companies, building on the 3 rd principle of RPL. This interaction between the virtual learning factory and reality enables the students to reflect upon their practice, building on their prior knowledge, when evaluating the assignment related to the learning factory setting. Moreover, the explorative approach enables the student to use the gained knowledge within their practice immediately. Lastly, the discussion based on these as- signments with the fellow students and the teachers is a room for dialogue, as described in the 6 th RPL principle. These implementations of the RPL principles within the two pilots allow the students to gain planned opportunities for reflection and creates a foundation for enhancing their learning output directed towards workplace practice situations. Hence, the educational designs’ adoptio n of the RPL principles, supports the transfer of knowledge from the edu- cational situation into practice, as described by Merrill (Merrill, 2015). Hence, the students will have the opportunity to experience additional gains from the reflection-based pilots compared to traditional lecturing aimed at upskilling industrial employees. These gains will include gains within the contextual skills of the 21 st century skills, such as communi- cation, awareness of technology impact, and adapting to a (technologically) complex en- vironment (van Laar et al., 2017). Learning Factory model Pilot 1 uses a physical learning factory setting, where the students of the pilot (industrial employees enrolled for upskilling) are collaborating with full-time student (from another similar full-time educational programme) to work on the learning factory. They will further- more work together on real-life products and services from the industry, provided by the employers of the students. In the learning factory, they will work on a physical product. These two activities let the students explore a real value chain. Hence, this can be seen as a learning factory within the broader sense, as defined by Abele et al. (Abele et al., 2019) Pilot 2 uses a digital learning factory setting, where the students explore and investigate a virtual value chain, focussing on following elements: Production flow, product configura- tion, technology impact and manufacturability. The digital setting allows the students to work with a complex case (a whole value chain) in a manageable manner. Afterwards, the students return to their respectively companies, identifying these elements related to the value chain in their companies. Thereby the students connect the theoretically ob- tained knowledge to situations in practice. Hence, this pilot can also be seen as a Learn- ing Factory in the broader sense, as defined by Abele et al. (Abele et al., 2019) University College of Northern Denmark 151/193
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