Anticipate the skills of the future and detect those that are currently in the market in a “timing” almost perfect for what the labor market needs is a new full-time job for educational institutions.
This is one of the disruptive lessons that Marco Lampugnanidirector of the Innovation Laboratory in the Vice-Rectorate of Internationalization, Innovation and Incubation of Universidad Tecmilenio, in Monterrey, Nuevo León, Mexico, recently shared with the teams of Guatevision and Free Press within the space Guatemala Does Not Stop.
In an interview conducted by Alberto Toro, Lampugnani expressed the importance of questioning evaluation methods, anchored to study programs, instead of reorganizing the programs by competencies.
There is also a need to capture data with artificial intelligence to then convert it into programs that are part of the lives of students and incubate “relevant” and “effective” projects as a crucial step to understand the needs of employers and work in collaboration with them.
This is an excerpt from the conversation with the academic and creative.
Where should the system begin to implement competency-focused mechanisms?
We must consider that the people we train are really the result of our educational institutions; they are not the courses or academic programs. These are instruments that we create so that people can be trained. A focus on competencies must necessarily begin by saying what kind of people we want to train, what competencies they need to be successful in their life, in their work, in a world that is changing so rapidly. There are multiple reports that indicate which competencies are most required by employers—both hard and soft—and these change and are updated every year. Therefore, knowing what we want to train is the core of what we must do. Later, once we have identified them, we call them hot competencies in the market, which are the most in demand.
We also identified the skills we call those of the future: which are the skills that are not yet relevant today, but which will be relevant in five, seven or ten years and which we must begin to develop so that people have them and they remain relevant. This is the strategic layer.
Later, we enter a more academic stage, since competencies are formed through active learning processes. A competency is not developed by reading a text or listening to a teacher giving a class; it is developed by generating activities that allow it to be developed. Therefore, we must move towards active learning models.
There are several levels of mastery of a competency, so this requires a change in the assessment processes. It must become a continuous monitoring process that helps people to have traceability of how they are progressing in their learning, instead of being moments of control. Instead of thinking regarding whether people are failing or not in the expectations of a teacher, We should also free up the assessment process and decouple competencies from courses.because these develop at any time, even when you finish a course that is intended to help you. Therefore, the evaluation by competencies should be by academic periods.
It is not just asking if he learned the text that he was given to read; We should ask people how they want to be evaluated.how comfortable they feel depending on their learning style and also their working style, so that we can put them in a comfortable situation and they can help us understand what they have actually learned.
The focus on competencies is a radical change, but it is also necessary, because today employers out there are looking for people to have certain behaviors. and behaviors, much less what type of degree or certification they have.
How to understand the methodology used at Tecmilenio University?
We work with a methodology that focuses on our users. We seek to understand what people need and what life situation they are in in order to create educational products that help them develop the skills they need at that specific moment in their life. Therefore, what we create are not courses named following a traditional subject, but educational products that address people’s specific needs. We do this with current methodologies, design-based processes, and radical pedagogies.
We use agility tools to ensure that this is implemented quickly and with certainty, clearly, with significant use of sophisticated digital tools and also with a data-driven culture.
How should project incubation be carried out in academia so that it yields results when it reaches companies?
We higher education institutions, and I say this with affection, are not the most innovative and fastest-changing organizations. Therefore, we require new processes for the incubation of products that are often very different from what we have done before. We seek to make people have an impact in their personal and professional lives.
The first thing is to know the employers, not just the users, but the employers who have specific needs. If we create our educational offer with the best employers in the market, we can generate an offer synchronized with what is being requested outside and also within our organizations. We must work with agility, without fear of experimenting with new products and methodologies that take us out of our comfort zone. Therefore, as educational organizations, we must seek to acquire knowledge and skills in projects that are constantly updated, taking into account that technology also advances rapidly.
How do you use artificial intelligence in this entire innovation process?
We use it to speed up and optimize the generation of information and the creation of content. We have even developed tools like those of GPT They can create an entire course to meet the needs of the user. Artificial intelligence can also be used a lot in user engagement. We are creating companions that are not human, like expert mentors who advise users.
They are intelligences trained to provide support to our learners, that is what we call our students, depending on the topics that are most important. However, Artificial intelligence is also very important to maintain intimacy with users through the processing of their data.which allows us to offer a more personalized offer. We must seek to innovate, learn more and incorporate more artificial intelligence so that it can unleash its potential, which is still just beginning.
How do you involve teachers in this process?
Initially, there was a lot of concern in education regarding the arrival of artificial intelligence, because it was thought that students would cheat us and do their homework with it. Today, clearly, following a short time, this perception has already changed and it is understood that the skills of using artificial intelligence are as basic as any other type of skill in digital literacy.
We must encourage our users to use artificial intelligence, because this is what will be demanded of them in life and in the world of work. In the same way, we must not only train students to develop these skills, but also Train our teachers to use artificial intelligence within the academic process that they develop, and also in the relationship with users.
In the learning objectives, we should evaluate whether any student presents a task that is declared to have been done with artificial intelligence, since the quality of the work depends on the interaction that he or she has had with artificial intelligence. Therefore, for example, grading the prompt is a new challenge, and we are only seeing the first implications.
The pandemic has exposed Latin America’s education systems. Is it possible to implement the Tec Milenio method on a mass scale?
The methods we use are our own, adapted to our needs, but they are part of methodologies that are out there; it is not our patent. The great challenge to scale this to many higher education organizations is the cultural transformation that they must make to embark on a path that synchronizes them with the present. A cultural change is required in which organizations put at the center of the process not only the academic-pedagogical, but also the the needs of users, and start worrying regarding the future.
The goal is to generate an academic offering that helps people manage this uncertainty. Secondly, higher education institutions need to acquire talent to generate an offering that allows us to face this future. These are different profiles from those normally hired by universities. Third, there is a need to leadership in institutions to understand that a transformation must be carried out and, therefore, generate the conditions that provide the resources and establish the incentives so that their own organization can be transformed.
How is virtuality affecting teaching methods and academic performance?
Some research during the pandemic found that people were split 50/50 between being very happy to work from home and not. That also applied to education. What’s interesting is that the reasons people said they were happy to work or study from home were exactly the same: the same reasons why they didn’t like, for example, travel times. There were people who probably said, “I like the time when I’m commuting because it’s a time to reflect, read a book, and think,” and there were people who said, “I don’t like commuting.”
With in-person learning, we will always find people who prefer one modality or another. Being able to direct our users to study in fully in-person, fully virtual, or hybrid modalities, depending on their profile and learning style, is crucial. There are people who can perform very well in one modality and not so well in another, and many times they don’t have a good time in education because they simply didn’t enroll in the right program for them with the right learning modalities.
What are the major challenges facing all higher education institutions regarding virtual education?
First, it makes it more difficult to generate active learning aimed at developing skills, because much of the online educational offering is based on the consumption of content: you watch texts, you watch videos, you consume content, but you don’t develop skills. That is the great challenge: generate real, active, competency-based learning online.
This is, in short, the great challenge of virtual education: directing users towards their ideal learning modalities, whether in-person, hybrid or virtual, and truly generating education with active online learning. To achieve this, it is necessary to implement digital tools that go directly to that learning partner, to the right student.
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