Currently, education has been facing different challenges due to the covid-19 pandemic, as confirmed by Billy Crissien, Executive Director of EAN University, who spoke about the university’s proposals to improve the educational sector in this new reality.
What are the challenges of higher education in Colombia?
Little by little enrollment has been decreasing and it is thought that universities are going to end because new educational platforms for short courses have arrived (…). In the end, all education is a complement to each other. Also, there is terminology that also in the pandemic began to confuse the market and students, because one thing is digital education, another virtual education and another thing is traditional education or training.
How have you been with these challenges?
We managed to reduce inter-semester absence from 16% in 2018 to 12% in the first semester of 2022 and had a total accumulated growth of 25.7% of active students, going from 8,700 to more than 11,000 in the same period.
You propose to manage a university as a startup, how does it work?
It is the thought system and the way they work. They are agile, understand the market quickly and deliver information in an affordable way. In this case of mass education, there is a great coverage of the population, but what it lacks is that it be of good quality. We turned EAN University into an organization that works that way. It is an agile organization that thinks about the market.
Why micro certifications?
When the boys go out to the labor market nobody employs us because they are rookies. What we want through these micro-certifications is to go hand in hand with higher education, that they enable students to do different things while they are studying, and put it into practice from the first semester and throughout your career.
What has the university innovated?
We created an educational platform called EanX, which makes the micro-credentials while you are studying at the university.
What strategies are implemented to integrate more high school graduates into higher education?
According to Fedesarrollo, of 100 high school graduates nationwide, only 39 manage to access higher education, which is why we, as a university, made the decision to be of very high quality. As a university we make all forms more flexible to maintain the study. We grew during the pandemic an average of 5.5% each semester in total volume of students.
Does virtual education guarantee learning?
During 2019 we began a transformation, making platform changes, within the university without having a clue what we were going to face. For the pandemic we were 100% virtual with all the teachers trained and all the platforms prepared.
Our students in virtual environments are so good that the indicators of state tests such as Saber Pro are often better than face-to-face ones.
How much has been invested?
There are many millions of pesos that we re-invest, thanks to the growth we have had, for example, the virtual reality laboratory, you can enter the metaverse in a classroom that is more or less 200 or 300 meters large and we will give you a vest with some goggles for the experience.
Also in engineering laboratories, technology, educational models, training, since our ideal is to invest to have a much more advanced education.
And in infrastructure…
Our building is an icon today in architecture of the city of Bogotá, we invested more than $85,000 million with the lowest rate because it is a sustainable building.
How much is a career in virtual environments worth?
The semester is worth between $2,500,000 and $3,000,000
What plans do you have for the future with these programs?
We also want to offer programs through virtuality, strengthening research and understanding of the national and international environment in order to deliver the best education.
DIANA K. RODRIGUEZ T.
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