Evolution of Technical Projects with Social Commitment in Degrees of Industrial Engineering

A service-learning project, the so-called OSOR (Open-source and SOcial Responsibility) have been implemented from 2018 to 2022 in the “Manufacturing Technology” (MT) subject. Its aim is to manufacture products to assist people in a dependency situation. We investigate how the OSOR evolution has affected students’ learning outcomes, the subject’s significance, the level of difficulty, and other factors. We identified four main variants, which depended on internal and external factors. We discovered that the various variants had no effect on MT’s final score. The COVID-19 pandemic in the academic year 2019–2020 reduced hands-on activities and, presumably, the acquisition of essential technical knowledge. Regardless of the implemented format, a sizable portion of students thought the MT subject was fascinating and crucial to their future jobs. The introduction of an assigned patient and the ill-defined nature of cases could be the reason for an increase in the perceived subject difficulty. Additionally, this may help to explain why students’ general feedback focused less on the OSOR and more on their overall ‘satisfaction with the subject’. Having complete creative freedom and control over the deliverables during variant 1 gave a higher level of satisfaction than working on scenarios with loose requirements imposed by actual patients during variants 2 to 4. The most notable products were successfully produced despite the challenges in variants 3 and 4 being more complex. The final poll for the upcoming edition of OSOR will include particular questions to evaluate the development of social responsibility competency.