Comprised of 100 voluntary students from traditional first cycle, the section has a dual objective: To decompartmentalize disciplines / develop transversal concepts and to implement new approaches for increasing quality in work. 

It is undeniable: students have changed. This is due to different factors: Compartmentalized and volatile tuition, a loss of meaning and knowledge insufficiently put into perspective in relation to the world around us and the emergence of new technologies, all of which has significantly disturbed students’ relations with information and modified their methods of learning.

On the basis of this observation, we need to develop new teaching methods that will enable students to deploy their capacities as well as possible.

The Grammar School and Baccalaureate reform will lead to a certain number of changes: Programmes will evolve and students’ acquired knowledge will change substantially at the beginning of the 2013-2014 academic year.
The First Cycle has decided to seize this opportunity for making educational training evolve by launching an “Educational Innovations” section that reaffirms the INSA model’s strong-points. Even if the project bears the attractive title of “innovation”, it still remains a really complex venture. By setting up this “different” tuition system, the Undergraduate Cycle intends to “adapt itself” to the new generation of students and to use new tools, taking its inspiration from practices already in use in other approaches (especially international approaches).

The educational team is comprised of 50 voluntary teachers, who may, at long term, be dispersed throughout the First Cycle for applying all these innovations. A training system has been specially set up for them.
Supply of reference scientific works, development of self-tuition tools and a module for providing education on company life are some of the innovations set up this year.
In parallel, information and communication technologies for teaching (TICE in French) offer a multitude of possibilities for increasing interactivity (using clicker ballot boxes or MCQs in lessons), tuition in modelling with the help of digital methods as well as enabling students to work independently (on-line resources).

“The idea of this project is not to revolutionize the First Cycle but to rebalance educational methods” concludes Carole Plossu.
“Together, we are defining a route and trying to progress step-by-step in order to promote transverse functions between scientific subjects and classics and make the confrontation between methods of education evolve towards a new equilibrium between different methods of teaching”.
The important thing is to have gained experience by September 2013. Experience that is perhaps modest, but which will enable the First Cycle department to make “enlightened” choices, thanks to the new methods of tuition, which will have been tested during the 2012-2013 academic year.