Teaching Factory

Teaching Factories Network

EIT Manufacturing Education activities expand on the Teaching Factory paradigm with a Teaching Factories Network.

What is it? A Teaching Factory is a collaboration space where practitioners bring experience from the factory to teach students, while students and faculty bring knowledge from the classroom to teach practitioners. This collaboration is supported with a web conferencing platform and is an ongoing process, with regular sessions and continuous interaction between the factory and the classroom.

The EIT Manufacturing Teaching Factories Network enables companies and learners to interact on a wide variety of challenges and disciplines.

Taking Teaching Factories to the next level

The TF KnowNet project, which was started in 2020 and continued in 2021, takes the Teaching Factory concept to the next level by extending it into a network comprising both leading industrial partners and renowned universities.

Through this project, industrial partners offer information regarding standard practices and practical knowledge, and bring real-life challenges to the table. In return, they receive open-innovation-inspired problem-solving assistance from academics, who have access to the most recent research and concepts. The project grants industrial players access to test beds, so they can validate a new concept before applying it at full scale. Industry partners also have the possibility to request that their own employees get training on a specific topic.

EIT Manufacturing’s Doctoral and Master School Programmes are also built on the Learning & Teaching Factories paradigms, to ensure a practical, and hands-on approach that is anchored in industrial reality.