Description
Led by Yncréa Méditerranée and its Toulon campus, and supported by the ISEN network in Lille, Brest and Morocco, the FR2I project is one of the 12 winners of the call for projects "Initiatives of Excellence in Innovative Digital Training" launched as part of the Future Investment Program (PIA).
The FR2I project focuses on the first three years of post-baccalaureate training. It aims to introduce digital content and tools in a significant way in engineering training. Interactive content will be complemented by approaches including coworking, codesign and innovative project-based teaching. This system will facilitate the international development of courses and the deployment of remote sites.
Objectifs
The FR2I (Formation en Réseaux d'Ingénieurs Internationaux) project had the following objectives:
- To develop 18 MOOCs, SPOCs, online courses ... on the campuses of the Yncréa group;
- To connect the campuses by relying on 12 spaces (lecture halls, classrooms, etc.);
- To set up a collaborative portal between teacher-researchers;
- To innovate pedagogically, to inform, to publish and to contribute to our international development in order to :
- To develop our position within the major schools already present in the world of e-learning and blended-learning;
- To increase our capacity and the quality of our training;
- To communicate on our core businesses, on our fundamental subjects and then on our specialties.
Partners
Main teacher-researchers involved
Project Director
Jean-Michel ROLLAND
Activity manager
Agnès LAVILLE
General Manager
Christian PAUL
Director of Training
And also: Christine PERONY
More details
The architecture of the project is built around three axes:
- a dynamic technical axis, which must allow the acquisition of the engineer's knowledge and know-how from remote access points by using all information access resources,
- an interactive pedagogical axis which must facilitate the understanding, appropriation and application of the engineer's skills in the different stages of the learning process,
- a permanent innovation axis that must take into account cultural and technological societal transformations in order to train the engineers of the future in a hyperconnected, international and changing world.
However, we are faced with the following problems:
- The IT and network infrastructure currently offers external connections at speeds of up to 100 Mbits/s. This is still insufficient to enable the mass transmission of resources, including multimedia data exchanges (video) and the sharing of modules with up to 5,000 users and a large number of simultaneous connections;
- The transformation of traditional ways of communicating knowledge through the prism of a digital platform (the R&D heart of the project), a plurality of media and multimedia documents is likely to undermine the transmission of information. There is no certainty whatsoever as to how the modules will be used and how they may be misappropriated;
- The international perspective, with its focus on the business world, places the modules in a different context, since they must offer a socio-economic rather than an academic perspective. Indeed, companies' needs in terms of engineers are enormous. For the CDEFI, the number of graduates from engineering schools should be increased by 50% over the next five years, from 35,000 to 50,000 per year. The impact of our approach will be visible through our deliverables (digital platform, debriefing, colloquia, etc.) and indicators measuring the attractiveness, transformation of practices, social contribution and dissemination of the content of the system. Part of our work (not included in the CIR) involves the production of 18 modules, divided into 25 hours of face-to-face training and 25 hours of personal work. These modules cover Linux (basics and system programming, Object-Oriented Approach and probabilities).
The project also involves setting up the technical infrastructure for delivering the modules in synchronous or asynchronous mode (remote, face-to-face, or even mixed), as well as implementing the digital platforms that will host the various modules. Our "Linux - System Programming" module is currently being tested by a group of 88 users.
Users and their uses are at the heart of our work on knowledge transmission. The leverage effect of this FR2I project is primarily aimed at high school students, preparatory classes, IUT and BTS. However, the actors who feed it and actively participate in the dissemination of knowledge are the teaching teams and the teachers-researchers.
The large number of people involved in knowledge transfer represents a significant challenge. Indeed, despite the awareness and feedback generated by the project, a number of obstacles remain:
- The workload for teachers, which requires a human and time investment whose return in terms of gain is not always perceived;
- Skepticism about digitalization, which represents concern about the proliferation of MOOCs compared to traditional (face-to-face) courses and the fear of a fad rather than an enrichment of practices.
The dissemination and sharing of knowledge within the framework of this project requires that a dialogue and mediation be implemented between the different actors so that meaning and benefit can be associated with the required work.
It's a project that we're planning to carry out over the next ten years, and which will require a great deal of human resources. The project will essentially be managed by three bodies: a steering committee, a scientific committee and a technical committee.
Results obtained
We have been able to reach and exceed most of our objectives thanks to the faster than expected investment of a group of teacher-researchers, pedagogical engineers, digital engineers and technicians motivated by this project and to the task force dedicated to initiating and monitoring it. This human investment in the development of pedagogical innovations still needs to be strengthened with regard to the time devoted to research, which is still the main lever of recognition for teacher-researchers in relation to their teaching load.
5 years on the scale of digital evolution is a very long time, which led us, in an Agile logic, to revise our initial hypotheses both at the technical level and at the level of learning and teaching behaviors.
The requirement to move to distance learning as a result of the COVID-19 epidemic and the investment of external providers specializing in e-learning and blended learning also contributed greatly to the achievement of the objectives.