Digitally Enabled Experiential Learning Spaces for Engineering Education 4.0

Novel digital technologies have transformed societies, organizations, and individuals in diverse aspects of daily life, elevating their competency requirements in order to successfully develop, integrate, and generate value. To remain relevant Higher education should provide students with digitally enhanced learning experiences to build their necessary competencies. To progress in this direction, this work proposes a method that can be used to develop digitally enabled experiential learning spaces (DeELS) in engineering education so as to incorporate digital technologies into engineering problem-solving and decision-making activities, as an innovative approach to Education 4.0. Two implementation cases exemplify the digital transformation of these learning spaces in the Lean Thinking Learning Space (LTLS) for undergraduate engineering courses. The exemplification shows how students, through designing, creating and integrating digital/smart kanban systems, execute their learning activities in a DeELS. The results suggest that the students were able to satisfactorily achieve their learning outcomes through the learning experiences. Moreover, new instances of learning experiences for digital transformation were identified within the LTLS. However, future work is required regarding new instances of digital transformation learning experiences in order to make any further inferences or generalizations regarding DeELS and their contribution to competency development. ©The authors, MDPI.