Practicing Problem Based Learning (PBL) for teaching quality control tools:Case study of metrology and quality engineering course

Abstract

Teaching is becoming a challenge in the current era. The student's interest decreasing day by day due to a lot of other reasons such as use of social media, and other distractions. The conventional style of teaching is no more effective and lot of research has been made in the use of different teaching methods such as project based learning, peer to peer learning, problem based learning etc. All these tools happens to be effective for the current students. This is more often in subjects which are theory based. The current work aims at using the real life problems for teaching Quality Control Tools to students of Third Year Mechanical Engineering. There are some Quality Control tools which are used for imparting quality in the product or the process. These tools are useful for finding out the causes for a nonconforming process or a non conforming product such as Pareto Chart, Cause and effect diagram etc. The students were taught these tools with the help of some real life problems directly faced by the students. This helped in grabbing the attention of the students as they feel that whatever is taught is part of their daily routine. The students were also given assignments on the said topic related to their own problems. The effectiveness of the said work was determined by conducting a test on the said topic for the students who were taught using this tool and the other set of students who were taught the topic in the conventional way. It was found that there is a marginal difference between the learning levels of the students of both the groups. It can be concluded that the use of modern teaching methods proves effective for the learning of the students.