The Application of Social Learning Theory and Communities of Practice to a Complex, Ill-Defined Domain in Engineering

Abstract

This article describes a research programme which utilised Bandura's Social Learning Theory and Lave and Wenger's Communities of Practice as components of a pedagogical framework for the design and application of a teaching intervention in a manufacturing systems course. This course occupies one semester of the third-year of a four year undergraduate degree in engineering at the University of Auckland, New Zealand. The novel teaching intervention described here took the form of a multimedia-based virtual manufacturing enterprise set in a complex authentic context. This article describes the design of the intervention and presents the data collected on the students' experiences with the virtual organisation.