Abstract:

Currently, research is a fundamental component of education at the university level; however, this activity on development faces various limitations stemming from the socio-political context in which the Colombian university appears, and more precisely in which UNIMINUTO VRBS is developed. These problems are installed both in the characteristics of the educational centers’ organization, and in the human resources available in each one of them. On that basis, this work seeks to contextualize university research in Colombia, placing special emphasis on the work carried out by UNIMINUTO VRBS between 2013 and 2017, allowing various considerations to arise regarding the formulation of projects and lines of research, as well as of the necessary implementation of academic policies that enable a better development of the investigative practice.

The formulation of this research is based on two fundamental lines, first, the analysis of the different variables that point to the problem of university research in Colombia, in which there is a growing appreciation of the policies of science and technology that have been generated by state entities since 1994 thanks to Conpes 2739, and second, with the staging of the National System of Science, Technology and Innovation, since the creation of Colciencias 10 years ago, with which several restructuring processes have been generated at the country level about how the research activity in universities should be organized. Two lines that are of vital importance and become valid before the negative diagnoses that the investigative practice has in Colombia, which appears in the fifth position of the QS ranking (World University Rankings 2014) in Latin America, with only 5 universities, preceded from lowest to highest by Chile (7), Mexico (7), Argentina (9) and Brazil (17).

Therefore, the information collected in this paper was carried out through a methodological process of exploration, description and correlation between Colombian universities - with special interest in UNIMINUTO VBS - and research policies generated from the public. It is in this sense that the variables such as number of seedbeds, production of papers, editorial production and number of teachers will be correlated and explained. The Hermeneutic method used was the holistic methodology posed by Hurtado (1998) retaken by other researchers like Londoño & Marín, (2002) and Hernández, Fernandez & Baptista (2010), that provide us with a sense of understanding of the phenomenon and the processes of exploration, description and correlation or association of variables.

All this from the direction and documentation from the State with the government agencies responsible for this activity such as the Ministry of National Education (MEN), the National Commission for the Quality Assurance of Higher Education (CONACES), the Colombian Institute for the Development of Science and Technology (COLCIENCIAS), among others, with the research practices carried out at UNIMINUTO VBS.

The foregoing, will allow a theoretical construction that supports the generation of strategies that lead to the formation of undergraduate students in research competencies, through effective practices that make visible the seedbed processes and the production of papers and projects from this level of the propaedeutic cycle.

Keywords:

Strategies, practice, development, policies, Higher Education.