Our company’s experts in technology for education met with engineers and academics to discuss the leading solutions for educational management that data analysis can provide. They were part of the 29th Congress of Engineering Education in Chile, organized by the Chilean Society of Engineering Education (Sochedi) and the Faculty of Engineering and Sciences of the Universidad de La Frontera, held on October 5-7 in the lakeside town of Pucon, southern Chile.
u-planner – also serving as s sponsor – had a leading agenda. After opening the first day of seminars, with a conference on products that support higher education management and teaching, the u-planner team presented an academic paper with the benefits of Data Science, as a trigger to improve higher education.
From left to right: Sebastián Flores, Head of Data Science; Alejandro Romero, Head of Business Development; Rodrigo Hernández, Academic VP.
The research, by Sebastián Flores, Head of Data Science; Rodrigo Hernández, Academic VP and Cristián Espinoza, Head of Research and Development, illustrates how a data science application in education has a great potential to optimize the efficiency of internal processes and resource and can improve the teaching experience for students.
On the other hand, it underlines the different areas where higher education institutions require optimizing processes, such as planning for higher education and improving student retention projections.
With data science techniques and analysis, “it is possible to turn available information on desertion rates, calibrate the model that better applies to these data, and use it to predict the possible defection of students that remain in the institution.”
“Higher education institutions have a variety and multitude of data, that require a process of extraction and transformation into a series of clean and consistent data that can be used as entry level information in modeling algorithms, and its use requires careful development and testing to manage precise predictions.”
Reactions to the meeting
Georgina Díaz, Ph.D. from the Department of Chemical Engineering at the University of Santiago, valued getting to know companies that provide this kind of service, “and not to think that you need to develop a software yourself," she said.
“It is highly important to have this level of practical support, with a vision to say ´this is achievable and acquirable.'”
Sebastián Flores, u-planner Head of Data Science, underlined the presence of the company in this event. “I think that both speakers, assistants and sponsors believe this was a great success and a very useful meeting,” he said.
"We managed to talk to people we were looking for and discuss our solutions with many universities. To u-planner, this was a fascinating event, and we plan to attend again next year".
29th Congress of Engineering Education in Chile
This year, the event discussed human capital in engineering, in the context of a global society. Around this topic, 220 experts and professionals from Chile attended different seminars and conferences, according to Universidad de La Frontera.
Experts gathered around the presentation of a hundred research papers on engineers’ academic background, virtual learning platforms, and the use information technology and educational software, among other topics.
Jorge Yutronic, Senior Consultant u-planner
Ruth Novoa, chairperson of the organizing committee, said that the event “helps to gather experts with the key players that intervene in how engineers are educated in Chile,” around the main topics for the industry, as well as the changes and new technologies in the field.
Each day included experts from Chile, the United States and Mexico. For instance, Mayahii Manuel Tamez, co-founder of Fundación Mayahii, discussed how to adopt technologies to boost education and a digital economy. On the other hand, María Elena Barrera, director of the Consejo de Acreditación de la Enseñanza de la Ingeniería, A.C. (CACEI) – a Mexican accreditation institution – explained in detail how international accreditation process works.
