The GEDC gave recognition to the director of UTNBA’s Education Research and Innovation Center

Eng. Uriel Cukierman, Director of the Education Research and Innovation Center (in Spanish, CIIE) at UTN Buenos Aires, participated in the World Engineering Education Forum (WEEF) and was honored by the Global Engineering Deans Council (GEDC) for his valuable contribution to the institution.

The GEDC celebrated its tenth anniversary during its second annual meeting, which was held on the same day as the WEEF and, during the celebration, it offered recognition to “people who have had an important role in the Council. To my surprise, because I didn’t know anything, I was included among those people,” Cukierman explained.

“I take it –he continued– as recognition for the work we have been doing in Latin America and in Argentina; because before 2012, when we at UTN organized the WEEF in Buenos Aires together with the CONFEDI [Federal Council of Engineering Deans], there was almost no representation in Latin America and, since then, such representation has greatly increased.”

The event was held from November 12 to 16 in the city of Albuquerque, in the state of New Mexico, United States.

The CIIE director highlighted the participation of several Argentine Deans and of student representatives and teachers from different UTN’s Regional Schools.

The annual meetings of the IFEES executive committees were held on those four days. At the same time, Cukierman organized “a panel on breakthrough innovations in education, with representatives from countries where very innovative experiences are being conducted. It was attended by members of Universities from Mexico, the United States, Denmark and Great Britain, among others. We are going to write a paper collectively with all the panel participants. I also submitted a paper about a research work we conducted at the CIIE.”

Cukierman explained that this kind of events seem to show that “the tendency in education is moving towards a project-based learning model, that is, moving away from the separate and disconnected subject scheme and instead posing problems to the students. It consists of engineering projects that must be solved based on individual learning with the help of tutors or mentors who provide organization, guidance and orientation. This implies taking some classes but abandoning the very strict model we have which involves taking a specified number of courses per year.”