Work in progress - An improved teaching strategy for lean manufacturing education

This paper reports our continuous efforts in developing and implementing an improved teaching strategy to enhance lean manufacturing education. As an interdisciplinary engineering and business instructor- team, we have jointly taught a lean course twice. Based on our experience in the first course, we made five improvements in the second course, which include 1) careful redesign of the course syllabus to be more student friendly, 2) enhancements to the lean lego simulation focusing more on student learning, 3) starting the student-company team projects earlier to allow more learning through more meaningful projects, 4) introducing the use of a classroom response system to assess learning instantaneously in the classroom, and 5) using computer simulation to clearly show the benefits of lean principles in operational performance. This paper provides details for each of the five improvements and how they enhanced student learning. Enrollment in the second course grew nearly 300% and represents six departments from engineering, technology, and business. Course evaluation shows that the improved teaching strategy has generated a positive impact on student learning.