Workplace Learning in Higher Education

Abstract

Workplace learning arrangements are common practice in higher education in many countries
nowadays. Apart from the application of immediate competencies (the declarative knowledge),
workplace learning also involves the development of competencies that the students are required
to have in their future jobs.
This report presents an in-depth study of workplace learning specially applicable to industrial
engineering, which is the context more closely related to the authors' personal experiences. An
overview of such learning situations is presented from the point of view of student's learning
pedagogy.
With that in mind, the main objectives of this report are to:

• present an in-depth study of workplace learning specially applicable to industrial engineering scope;

• describe workplace learning in the context of higher education;

• analyze real case studies of workplace learning implementations, including both personal experiences and published material;

• identify and analyze the main problems of workplace learning based on the case studies.

The description of workplace learning is presented in Section 2. Some examples of workplace
learning implementations, personal experiences and case studies, are presented in Section 3,
which include four international examples of this teaching situation. In Section 4, some of the
advantages and disadvantages of workplace learning are identied and analyzed in terms of the
possible eects they might have on student learning. Finally, we draw some conclusions and
assess the outcome of this work in Section 5.