The knowledge and importance of Lean Education based on academics’ perspectives: an exploratory study

Abstract

This paper presents an exploratory study on the knowledge and importance of integrating Lean Education in curricula from the Academy perspective. The study was based on the analysis of participants’ outcomes of workshops settled in international conferences. These workshops were used to promote Lean Education as a fundamental content and competency to be taught to the new professionals, independently of their future activity. Having in their DNA Lean content and competency, professionals will be thinkers adopting whole system-thinking, a sustainable conscious and ethical behaviour prepared to face Fourth industrial revolution demands. The authors believe that Lean Education provides such competencies to the new professionals and have been settling and operationalized such workshops in different contexts, involving more than 100 participants (mainly, academics) with teaching responsibilities in training the future workforce. Workshops outcomes were obtained from participants’ active discussions and through a satisfaction assessment questionnaire filled by all participants at the end of the workshop. Results show that Lean Education is valuable by academics (more than 50% of the participants gave a high score to the practicality, value, and timeliness of the workshop contents). Nevertheless, a small percentage (12%) knows what Lean Education is or teaches Lean in the classes (10%).

Keywords:

• Lean Education
• workshops
• exploratory
• assessment
• questionnaire

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work has been supported by Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia (FCT) within the Project Scope: UID/CEC/00319/2019.

Notes on contributors

Anabela C. Alves

Anabela Carvalho Alves is Assistant Professor in the Department of Production and Systems, School of Engineering, University of Minho. She is member of ALGORITMI R&D Centre. She holds a PhD in Production and Systems Engineering. Her main research interests are: Design and Operation of Production Systems; Lean Production and Lean Thinking applied to different industries and services; Industrial Engineering and Management Education with focus on Lean Education and Project-Based Learning. She has published over 130 papers and she is author and co-author of two books and two edited books. She supervised one PhD and over 50 master dissertations in Industrial Engineering and Management. Currently, she is supervising five PhD students and more than 20 master dissertations. She is member of the board of the Master in Industrial Engineering. She is a permanent member of the Scientific and Organising Committee of the International Symposium on Project Approaches in Engineering Education (PAEE). She was involved in three R&D projects developed in partnership with Bosch company.

Celina P. Leão

Celina Pinto Leão, PhD in Engineering Science from Faculty of Engineering of the University of Porto, Portugal, presently at School of Engineering of University of Minho, Portugal, as an Assistant Professor. The research work in the ALGORITMI R&D Centre focuses her main scientific interests in modelling and simulation of processes, in quantitative and qualitative techniques in engineering and in the application of new methodologies in the learning process of numerical methods and statistics applied in engineering. Currently she supervises PhD and MSc projects in these areas, being co-author of several scientific papers published in international journals and conferences.

André F. Uebe-Mansur

Andre Fernando Uébe-Mansur holds a PhD in Computing in Education from the Federal Univesity of Rio Grande do Sul, a Master’s Degree in Production Engineering from the Norte Fluminense State University, a Master’s Degree in Social Comunication from the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro and a Business Management Degree from Candido Mendes University. At the Fluminense Federal Institute, he has presently been a coordinator of Teaching and its technologies for the Master and Doctoral Programmes in which he is a professor as well as in the programme of Master in Systems applied in Engineering and Management. As a member of the Computing in Education research group, he has been developing studies and publishing papers related to digital technologies for education, learning methodologies for education, Lean Education as also Social Midia for Education and company management.

M. Inês R. A. Kury

M. Inês R. A. Kury is a translator and an English teacher. She has experience in teaching English in the public and private sectors, as well as in Language Centers. She worked in the are of International relations and in the Coordination of the Science without Borders (SWB) program at the Fluminense Federal Institute. She holds the CPE (Cambridge Certificate of Proficiency in English); has a Masters Degree in the area of Cognition and Language, a Specialist Degree in General and Applied Linguistics to Language teaching; a BA in Letras – Portuguese/English, and a BA in Bilingual translation. She has been a member of the APLIERJ board since its foundation.