SCIENTIFIC AND TECHNOLOGICAL KNOWLEDGE: STRATEGIES FOR VIRTUAL EDUCATION IN A DEVELOPING COUNTRY

Transcription

1 SCIENTIFIC AND TECHNOLOGICAL KNOWLEDGE: STRATEGIES FOR VIRTUAL EDUCATION IN A DEVELOPING COUNTRY ARI ANTONIO DA ROCHA, PhD UFRN-Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Norte, Brazil ari@digi.com.br phone/fax: (+5511) PEDRO LUIZ DE OLIVEIRA COSTA NETO, PhD Fundação Vanzolini/EPUSP and UNIP, Brazil pluiz@vanzolini-ead.org.br phone: (+5511) ALLEN HABERT, MSc Fundação Vanzolini/EPUSP, Brazil allen@vanzolini-ead.org.br phone: (+5511) ABSTRACT Brazil, a territory reaching nearly continental dimensions, is a developing country where the need to increase economic growth and industrial competitivity is enormous. It is indispensable to propose and support continuous education programs on engineering and technology and use innovative solutions to qualify and recycle personnel. As reference we considered the programes Engenheiro 2001 and Projeto E, created inside the Vanzolini Foundation, that consisted in interactive videoconferences, broadcasted live weekly by the Brazilian communications satellite, transmitted to universities and institutions, in video-rooms instaled with financial support of the FINEP/MCT PRODENGE-Reenge program, throughout the country. Lecturers have been respected professors and professionals on Engineering, Technology and Management areas in Brazil and abroad. Each presentation, was followed by an interactive debate on line and covered subjects such as: the consequences of economic globalization; the future of engineering education (distance learning and web education); strategic management; developing new skills for a competitive work market; entrepreneurship, etc. The activity provided certification for the participants and the evaluation was carried out by a qualified Evaluation Committee whose results could also serve as feedback for the future events. Key Words: Virtual Education Distance Learning Technological Development

2 1. INTRODUCTION An ordinators world network will make accessible in a few minutes any kind of information to the students all over the world. (...) it will happen a revolution concerning the roles of student and professor. Canadian professor MC LUHAN (1964) predicted in the early sixties that mass media would form a "global village". That distances would be shortened by the electric medium, people would be able to know what happens in other countries or continents. How does this apply to the engineering education? Present transition times, works in favour of less developed regions, as South America, where changes can occurs quickly and nearly without any kind of resistence. Due the strategic situation which engineers find in the Brazilian productive process, they experience, for the first time, a double impact: the internationalization of the labor market through global networks and the change in the information, communication and learning paradigms. The problem comes from the scenery of technical-organizational changes. Therefore, the creation of a new culture of continuing education for engineers and professionals in the technological area is utmost important. The construction of a society s citizens and the survival and development of companies depend on this understanding and its practice. The challenge is to transform our engineers more and more into qualified professionals in order to solve problems, to diagnose opportunities and to promote strategic sales in the country and in the world. As the internationalization of education is already a reality, for the first time in humanity, electronic networks compel courses and disciplines into being global. Our engineering schools should follow this tendence, because to better serve society, engineers continually need to be re-qualifying, becoming lifelong students. The experience of long distance continuing education ECAD is globally devoted. In the USA, Canada, Mexico, Great Britain, France, Spain and Sweden, among others, there are several programs and experiments succeeding well for engineers in partnership with the managerial and academic sectors. In Brazil, the conservative vision of the elite about the role of education does not facilitate the prosperity of long distance education. Our delayed university are technicalbureaucratic organization and its crises did not allow it to be open to a wide representative of its knowledge. Therefore, our engineering schools have not yet adopted and institutionalized long distance continuing education. There are few experiments of ECAD in the sector and our own offer of continuing education is limited to a small portion of schools. Now the society demands more education, quality in teaching and work opportunities, conditions are ripe for the definitive implementation of ECAD. This alternative counts on the growing support of managerial, professional, academic and government sectors. In this sense, the objective of the project Engineer 2001 is to contribute to expand the development opportunities for engineers and professionals in the technological area and which seeks to integrate the agents on permanent professional development: professionals, universities, companies and government. Starting from this program, the ECAD modality was tested based on new communication technologies and information to reach and to sensitize in an interactive way a large public distributed in the various Brazilian regions. 2. THEORETICAL BASE According to REICH (1994), it is a category that enlightens the relationships among education, work and citizenship. Initially, the concept helps us to understand the strategic importance of knowledge for the competitiveness of a nation and helps us to sketch a perspective of the engineers professional development. Its understanding is radical with relationship to the nature of the wealth and knowledge accumulation process in three degrees: 1. Work generates value, but there is work that generates high value; 2. The symbolic analysts highly qualified work is responsible for the generation of high value; 3. The symbolic analyst s growth is a continuous process of learning supported by the school, the family and in professional environments. REICH asserts that a nation is more or less successful in the process of economy globalization, in exact proportion they can add value to the world economy, by its capacity in creating symbolic analysts, that means people interested on the knowledge that are beyond the technical ideas. And the symbolic analysts growth depends on the whole process of formal and professional education. They accumulate a great deal of knowledge during school life. But most important is that they learn from childhood how to consider problems and solutions. The young university student needs to fine

3 tune, during the school process, his four aptitudes: abstraction, systematic reasoning, experimentation and collaboration. The symbolic analyst s growth doesn t finish at his graduation. Another consideration is the tendency for changes in company policies and learning administrations. On this theme, FLEURY and FLEURY (1994) show that they have been developing the understanding of individual and collective learning in organizations and the relationship of the learning process to the innovational process. In this theory, it is important to highlight the valorization of strategic thought, that is to say, the long term planning, whose variables should be consistent, stable and achievable, because the actions of companies, governments, research institutes, universities and people are related to the national system of innovation. The integration of the decisive processes and the intelligent use of information is a challenge in Brazil because it is not enough that learning and innovation occur in the most advanced companies in non-integrated processes of the industrial system as a whole. It is interesting to observe the decisive role of the inter-company cooperation in establishing a competitive strategy because the cooperation intensifies the transfer of knowledge and information process, creating an synergetic effect of mutual learning in a certain economy. According to WALDMAN (1997), as the world becomes less regulated and more complex, society has more demand for engineering. We can observe that more and more engineers are called to act in areas and activities that previously did not have any relationship to engineering, as in finances, public policies, the entertainment industry, among others. In the new productive paradigm, the supremacy of a nation depends on the capacity of its companies to transform inventions into innovations first, better and cheaper. Therefore, competency in engineering processes and products is fundamental and has elements capable of overcoming comparative disadvantages, raw material ot energy source deficiencies. In this context, the importance of science and technology for engineering becomes decisive because it continues to be the source of knowledge and a systematized means to solve problems. However, this is no longer enough because engineering should produce solutions for a market of goods and services in which problems are not defined. Engineering, therefore, should be capable to converse with those two worlds: science & technology and the competitive market, being characterized by the engineer as a technological-marketing environment. The interface with science and technology is given by the knowledge that the engineer has of the principals of physics, chemistry, mathematics and instrumentation. With a basic knowledge of good quality in these areas, engineers are abble to solve well-formulated problems. With relationship to the engineer s interface with the market depends in great measure, among other capacities, on his capacity of making decisions that can involve subjective evaluations that the market wants, on the strategy of competitors, or the opportunity of decision. HABERT (1995) shows that, in the productive process, the administration of knowledge as a gathering value factor to products that depends more and more on qualified and re-qualified human force. Public and private companies should also become educational organizations. The articulation of education and professional development with ECAD is fundamental to be effective in the creation of a network of permanent growth conditions with the technological innovation apprenticeship in a productive system. 3. THE ENGINEER 2001 AND PROJETO E PROGRAMMES The study is defined to the examination of the Engineer 2001 and Projeot E programmes, multimedia events, considered the first in the virtual field of engineering teaching. The first phase of activities began at August 1996 and ended at April 1997; the second began at October 1999 and is programmed to spread out till the year The programmes are educational process of interactive seminars, transmitted live through satellite tele-conferencing, with an open signal for all parabolic antennas in the country and for cable TV in various regions. It is based on the need to assure the modernization and permanent re-qualification of engineers, teachers, students and professionals in the technological area. The programmes have two objectives: to implement an experiment of interactive learning, in real time, in the restructuring of engineering teaching including the entire nation, integrating the main actors for this change;

4 to create the basis for a learning community through the implementation of an associative organization, the RBE - Brazilian Engineering Network, for the modernization and professional development of engineers, teachers and students, having the ECAD modality. The public objective is the participation of tele-conferencing rooms in engineering schools that were specifically installed for this purpose. The participants had vertical and horizontal interactivity through fax, telephone and Internet with the coordination of the program, lecturers and debaters. The conception and the project of the Engineer 2001 and Projeto E programmes, produced by the Vanzolini Foundation, an institution linked to the Polytechnic School of the University of São Paulo, which aims to increase the quality and competitivity of Brazilian engineering, were sent to FINEP - Studies and Projects Federal Financing Organization, in October of 1995, for the occasion of the proclamation of PRODENGE - Program of the Development of Engineering, in agreement with the orientation of the subprogram Re-engineering of the Teaching of Engineering - REENGE. Those programmes have been the result of the partnership between the Ministry of Science and Technology, the Ministry of Education and The Ministry of Work, through action coordinated by FINEP, CNPq - National Council of Scientific and Technological Development, CAPES - the Foundation for Coordination and Improvement of Higher Education Personnel, of SESu - the Secretary of Higher Education and the FAT Found for Workers Support. There were five motivations for the Engineer 2001 and Projeto E programmes as the main reference: 1. To be programmes of national magnitude that unifies, for the first time, a wide group of state, federal, and private engineering schools and several technological schools; 2. To use tele-conferencing, via satellite, as the central information technology which maintains a balance of quality image reception and sound in any part of the country. There is, with the use of this technology, interactivity possible through fax, telephone and Internet between the generating central point and the tele-conferencing rooms spread throughout several states; 3. To use the Internet as a means of continuing the debate motivated by the tele-conference, before and after each seminar; 4. To be programmes instituted and accomplished by a non-profit foundation linked to the Department of Production Engineering of Polytechnic School of USP, one of the most traditional and important engineering schools of the country; 5. To be a program that has the support to the extent of the main incentive program of engineering in the country in the last decade - PRODENGE. The seminars of each program correspond to 26 hours of tele-conferencing with lecturers, debaters and a moderator on four sections of subjects: the conditions and the scenery of the future of engineering; the pedagogic restructuring of engineering teaching; the relationships with the labor market and university-companies; diffusion of technological education and the perspectives of public and private teaching in the country. The Engineer 2001 and the Projeto E programmes in methodology and technology used the following items: 1. configuration of tele-conferencing rooms for teleconference reception; 2. organization of seminars by means of interactive tele-conferences; 3. a communication outline in real time by means of electronic mail, fax and telephone (vertical interactivity); 4. previous supply of didactic material by means of printed paper (Participant Guides) for each tele-conference; 5. diffusion of the program in residences via cable TV and editing of 13 videos of the seminars; 6. organization of discussion groups - newsgroups and an Internet site (horizontal interactivity). 4. THE BRAZILIAN ENGINEERING NETWORK The RBE - Brazilian Engineering Network is a Brazilian network of knowledge. The objective is to interconnect professionals, engineering schools, companies, entities, and the public sector through the group of instruments of information technology to permanently qualify, re-qualify, re-convert, and develop skills for engineers, teachers, students, and executives of the technological area. It seeks to give organization to the engineering learning community, endowing it with collective intelligence. The Engineer 2001 program announced the virtual birth of RBE, that it is encouraged by all interested agents in the development of professional qualification and re-qualification. It has the objective of connecting the 700,000 engineers

5 and professionals in the technological area in the country. That is the community that the program sought to represent, to awaken, to develop and to recycle. The force of RBE is in its origin and in its objectives. Its has international connections and, more and more, it will create possibilities to transform each engineer into a citizen endowed with the capacity of self-learning. An important step in the development of RBE was the regional coalition of engineering schools that was initiated from the incentive of REENGE and of the Engineer 2001 program. The coalition of schools was made up of the North-Northeast, Minas Gerais, Rio Grande do Sul, São Paulo and others that are in the process of formation. Another important fact, due to this process, is the discussion of the formation of a Virtual Technological University in the country. It would act in an articulate way together with the engineering and technology schools, through the constitution of a non-profit institution, providing disciplines and university extension and post graduation courses, via connected learning (virtual and present). The public target would be professionals in the technological area that have already graduated, employees, temporary employees and the unemployed. Engineering schools and other public and private institutions would supply the courses and disciplines that would be in the Virtual Technological University, a form and a synergetic means of reaching the target market, that is to say, the productive and educational system. 5. SYNTHESIS OF THE ENGINEER 2001 AND PROJETO E PROPOSALS After the second to the last tele-conference, four conclusions and ten proposed directives of school action were made. They were analyzed and debated in the last conference, resulting in a unified document, fruit of the development process of the Engineer 2001 and Projeto E programmes. The conclusions pivoted on four central aspects approached during the program: International scenery: problems and opportunities; National scenery: dilemmas of industry and technology in Brazil; Paradigms: the new engineering and the future engineer; The re-engineering of engineering teaching: a key subject for national development. The ten proposals, below, demonstrate the inclusion and the extent that the program wanted to reach: 1. The engineering school should be understood as a learning, research and technological development community; 2. The school should teach to learn and know to do; 3. To promote quality and evaluate teaching and community service quality; 4. To promote the structure revision and the curriculum integration for wide understanding of engineering in the future; 5. To guarantee the engineering teachers continuous development; 6. To collaborate with the understanding of long distance continuing education demands of professionals and companies; 7. To develop and intensify partnership programs and cooperation; 8. Valorization of the master s degree; 9. To contribute to the improvement of education as a whole, especially of technological education at all levels and in basic teaching; 10. Democratic administration and participation, an active position in front of the resource needs. The resulting calendar of the interactive seminars, was ambitious and strategic: it presumed the accomplishment of a deep change in the educational system to accompany and to interfere in the productive paradigm in courses in the world and in the country. 6. RESULTS OF ENGENHEIRO 2001 PROGRAM Focusing on the objective of the study, the Engineer 2001 program has the capacity to extend and to diffuse this debate with depth, that until then was processed in small groups, for a potential of a large group of people. In schools, residences or companies, through parabolic antennas or cable TV, an interested public can accompany and interact with important subjects.

6 The diffusion of information that the technological base of telecommunications can provide, supplied a new meaning to the contents of everyone s debates and conclusions. The virtuality exercised a new role in the scheduled contents. Through the Brazilian Engineering Network, Engineer 2001 can supply this learning community with the possibility of beginning construction of a new identity. It is a pioneer process, complex and instigating, that developed elements for the reflection on the ext reme inclusion of the virtual in the planetary society and in local villages. The understanding of the causes and effects of virtuality aids the public objective of the program to be pro-active agents of transformation, in marks on the explicit calendar of Engineer 2001 and inside the process of citizen revolution. Long distance continuing education is part of the virtual field that is irreversible and, more and more, an element that integrates in people s daily life. The continuing and the virtual education for professionals in the technological area, it is imperative for engineers, citizens and organizations survival. The results of the Engineer 2001 program were measured through quantitative and qualitative approaches. The adhesion, permanence and participation of the schools at national level in 20 states of the country came at the end of the first phase of the program (1996/1997) for 92 out of 135 engineering schools. At the beginning of the program, there were only 8 schools with tele-conferencing rooms, growing to 35 at the beginning of the tele-conference transmission and arriving at 92 for the last interactive seminar. Half of the engineering and technology schools are public schools and the other half are private schools. The integration of the schools was growing and jumped at the beginning of the program. In the North area, 03 schools participated; in the Northeast, 11; in the Central-west, 04; in the Southeast, 59; in the South, 15. The 13 tele-conferences had around 16,000 participants in the 92 tele-conferencing school rooms. The cities of São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro were the centers of greatest participation. Besides this audience, there was another non-measurable group that participated through dozens of tele-conferencing rooms in companies and organizations (Petrobrás, Sabesp, Federal Economic Bank, SENAIs, SENACs, CST etc.) and through two cable TV channels (on the Net and Multi-channel networks). A satisfactory vertical interactivity was verified in the tele-conferences between the tele-conferencing room audience and the lecturers and debaters. During the 13 interactive seminars, 200 proposals and suggestions by the participants, lecturers and debaters were presented, synthesized in a final document containing 4 conclusions and 10 proposals of direction for changes in engineering teaching inside the context of new engineering and the future engineer. The horizontal interactivity among participants through newsgroups was weak. It lacked the interactivity instruments in real time among the lecturers, debaters and the tele-conferences audiences. The Participant s Guides, sent for the teleconferencing rooms, lacked a better didactic-pedagogic treatment. With relationship to the difficulties of the project, the Brazilian Engineering Network lacked a conceptual and operational project from the beginning of the process. The creation of regional school coalitions was the first decisive step for settling the objectives of RBE. In some schools, there was a controlled participation of the interested in the teleconferencing rooms, that consisted in a previous selection among the school directors or a lack of appropriate advertising towards the academic public. In cable TV media, there was a lack of adequate success at the technical level for the amplification of the program distribution for the whole country. Regional operators, have autonomy in relation to its central coordination and, many times, didn t promote the program for lack of a greater articulation and follow up. On the part of the school directors, there was a lack of adequate surveys conducted by the coordinators (Vanzolini Foundation), as an instrument in the program operation. In the same way, the potential of the media chosen, that is, the tele-conference, was not explored sufficiently. This is partly explained by insufficient details in the project of teleconferencing rooms in order to obtain a greater vertical interactivity, through the technical infrastructure of the schools (Internet). The whole process of implementation of the Engineer 2001 program demonstrates the need of an earnest process of change from the administration of traditional educational culture, to a culture based on new interactive technologies and centered in the autonomy of learning. 7. CONCLUSION AND PERSPECTIVES

7 In conclusion, we can affirm that the data obtained in our research-action presents strong evidence that long distance education, based on tele-information technologies, can be built on an effective strategy of continuing education program offers for engineers and professionals in the technological area on a wide scale and with quality. The professional scenery of the XXI century has little to do with reality for the majority of professionals that today are prepared to live and work. According to LÉVY (1995), globalization, flexibility, and exponential growth of information and virtual reality are dynamic movements related to each other, making up a intricate and complex total that has yet to see the reality of corporations, departmentalization and specialization of knowledge and also of the current relationships in the work world. The Engineer 2001 program < and the Projeto E < with a strong repercussion in Brazil and well-known in several other countries, became a mark in the discussion of changes for engineering teaching in a constantly changing scenery. This pilot experience solidified itself and is becoming a permanent program with the support of universities, comp anies, representative entities and the government. The Brazilian Engineering Network that is supporting this experience should reach its strategic objectives to implant a Virtual Technological University with diverse national and international presentations. 8. REFERENCES A. FLEURY and M.T.L. FLEURY (1995), Organizational Learning and Innovation. The experiences of Japan, Korea and Brazil. São Paulo: Publishing Atlas. A. HABERT (1995), Open, Long Distance Continuing Education and the Technologies of Information, Brazilian Long Distance Education Journal, Year II, no. 11, IPAE, Rio de Janeiro. P. L LÉVY (1994), Collective Intelligence. Pour unites anthropologie du cyberspace. Paris: Éditions La Découverte. M. MCLUHAN (1964), Understanding Media. Boston: MIT Press. R.B. REICH (1995), The Work of the Nations. São Paulo: Educator. H. WALDMAN (1997), Formation of People of Superior Level for Brazilian Telecommunications, presented at the National Seminar on Human Resources for Telecommunications: Challenges and Perspectives, Brasília, DF., December