CHANGE MANAGEMENT AND INNOVATION IN ENGINEER EDUCATION

Engineer education faces important challenges from students, governments, labor markets, and from within Universities, as education processes need to be more efficient and effective. Many institutions are implementing curricular innovations and new learning methodologies to address them.

However, learning innovations, including the introduction of new methodologies, have an impact on faculty performance, emotions and perceptions, as well as on organizational and faculty culture. They also tend to raise a series of management issues that are seldom addressed, risking learning innovations to fail.

Faculty management must learn how to manage those changes associated with the introduction of new methodologies and learning innovations. Change management, a relatively new discipline, offers new perspectives to address the costs and risks associated with change processes in education. It analyzes critical management issues such as the role of leadership, coordination, process design, and implementation strategies. Special emphasis is given to soft skills such as managing emotions, communicating project goals and achievements, and handling the critical issue of power structures and their evolution during change processes.

This article presents some of the change management strategies for a change process at Universidad San Sebastián, Chile, which included five engineering careers distributed geographically at four different campuses. This process included new curricula, a new teaching style and the creation of learning communities, all of it based on a shared vision, a series of pilot tests, an innovation ecosystem and new teaching methodologies.