Teaching Line Balancing through Active and Blended Learning*

Abstract

The design of balanced assembly lines, especially when considering workforce, material, and cycle time factors, is an important managerial decision-making activity in manufacturing firms. Numerous active learning activities are available to assist instructors in teaching assembly line balancing to students. While effective in improving student engagement, they require considerable planning and expense on the part of instructors, and they may be difficult to implement in inflexible teaching spaces and lecture-oriented curricula. We present a new approach to teaching line balancing using online videos depicting an assembly process. Students design an assembly line by determining themselves how to separate and time tasks, rather than by modifying an existing configuration. To save valuable classroom time, students complete a portion of the activity outside of class. This blended learning approach allows for all students to be engaged in the activity, both in and out of class. Furthermore, a controlled study showed that compared to the traditional lecture format, it better equips students to address less tangible aspects of line balancing, such as ergonomic and workforce factors, material handling considerations, and changing cycle time. With the online content for this activity completely developed and available, other instructors can easily implement this approach within their courses.

Beyond Comfort: Ergonomics in Engineering Education and Design

“…Universities must find out why students get hurt and find ways to teach students to be safe. For teaching, Bayley and Hurst (2018) made a new way to teach balancing lines. They used online videos and active learning to help students understand ergonomics better.…”

Learning management system‐integrated spreadsheet exercises for facility location modeling

“…Active and blended learning systems have proven effective in teaching operations management concepts (Bayley & Hurst, 2018). Coy et al (2017) empirically found that a carefully designed combination of traditional and flipped classroom approaches produced better learning outcomes than a lecture-free fully flipped classroom method to teach spreadsheet modeling in an SCM class.…”

Öğrencilere Montaj Hattı Dengeleme Tekniklerini Öğretmek için Bir Problem Çözme Ortamı

“…It has been shown to make a positive contribution as a learning mechanism in the experiments with undergraduate students. Bayley (2018) presented an active learning activity for teaching line balancing that addresses some shortcomings. They have described an activity to teach assembly line balancing that using special game sets to illustrate product assembly.…”