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Engineering projects affect many of the UN’s sustainability goals. The development and design of new products and systems using a circular economy perspective is an important challenge towards a more sustainable society. Product development projects have common process characteristics, but methodologies, tools and methods differ for developing hardware (mechanical and electrical) or developing software. In Mechatronics such methods need to be combined, and product development and project-based learning is well suited for teaching and learning within Mechatronics, in addition to technical specialization subjects within both mechanical, electrical and software engineering. It is also suited for developing consciousness for sustainability. At UiA project-based learning is a part of several courses. This article draw out some experiences from teaching two different project-based product development courses the last two years, one at Bachelor and one at Master level. The courses are viewed as products, and product development is used as methodology for developing teaching and learning as well. The aim is continuous improvement of the learning outcome of these courses. This is in accordance with the SoTL-approach, Scholarship of teaching and learning.

Agile tools such as Git are widely used in the industry for source control, collaboration and documentation. Such tools have been implemented in a mechatronic product development course to allow for easier collaboration between students. The course content is mainly provided using a GitLab Pages webpage which hosts software documentation and scripts. This course was first changed in 2019 to include the development of an autonomous strawberry picker. However, the use of standard learning management system and lecture slides provided a cumbersome experience for the students. Therefore, these agile tools were presented in 2020 version to improve the course. In this paper, the course content is detailed, and student feedback from both years are discussed to reveal the outcome of the changes.

The present study examines how two Danish manufacturing companies communicate corporate information to blue-collar employees located in foreign production units. By drawing on interview and document data from the companies’ communication departments, this study investigates whether staff at headquarters take any particular considerations into account when they communicate with blue-collar employees. The findings – which are discussed on the basis of communication accommodation theory (CAT) (Giles & Wiemann 1987) and the concept of foreigner talk (Ferguson 1975) – reveal that communication professionals at headquarters converge towards blue-collar employees in three distinct ways: in the form of stylistic, linguistic, and modal convergence. The findings also suggest that the need for convergence arises due to three sector-specific factors, namely the economic geography of manufacturing, the physical work environment of production units, and the educational level of blue-collar employees.