‘It is an ambitious project in the face of unavoidable societal challenges’

Interview with Christian Olagnon, Director of Education

The school's Council of Studies and Board of Directors have just approved a roadmap for education development by strengthening two major cross-cutting areas: sustainable development and social responsibility (SD&SR) and digital technology. In addition to these two key areas, the school is strengthening its education model over five years, with the first two years providing the basic skills base necessary for the engineering professions. Christian Olagnon, Director of Education, enlightens us on the content, scope and deadline of this project.

What motivates such changes and how will the education provided today change?

Everyone recognises that we are facing societal challenges of unprecedented intensity and magnitude. As far as the environment is concerned, although these issues were identified a long time ago (more than 30 years as far as the climate is concerned, for example), it has to be said that the problem has been ignored for too long or has not been given sufficient priority. However, the general perception of these issues is changing, particularly thanks to the work of the IPCC (see, for example the 2018 report on global warming of 1.5°C) and the IPBES (2019 report on the state of biodiversity and ecosystem services), which show unambiguously that deep and rapid transformations of our societies are necessary if we want to avoid an irreversible deterioration of our living conditions. The scientific evidence is such that it is no longer possible to put these topics off. The decarbonisation of the economy, in particular, has become a short-term imperative, to which engineers can and must make a major contribution in the years to come. Moreover, our students, rightly so, are already very aware and want to be actors of these changes. They have played a decisive role in recent years in pushing the institution to give these topics a higher priority. Beyond this awareness, the challenge now is to educate our students on these subjects, which are highly complex, interdisciplinary in nature, and represent ‘socially charged issues’. We must not only give them the keys to understanding, with solid scientific foundations, but also levers for action, so that they can contribute to providing solutions.

Another major societal transformation is the digital one. First of all, our ambition is that all INSA students, whatever their choice of speciality, acquire a solid background that enables them to master general technologies and digital environments. This is only partially the case today, so there is a need to significantly strengthen existing education devoted to digital technology. This will be done with dedicated courses, but also by making greater use of numerical computation in engineering science courses. Finally, students must also understand the changes, limits and societal impacts of digital technology, so that they can play a role in the digital transformation of the professional environments in which they will work.

In addition to these two components, SD&SR and digital technology, the institution is sticking with the ‘skills approach’, which must be continued and deepened. The principle is to build a coherent progression of teaching over five years so that graduates leaving school have acquired the skills referred to. It is this progression that needs to be improved and formalised, so that all educational activities contribute to these skills. This methodology is called the ‘programme approach’. It should be noted in passing that at INSA, we do not see the first two years as ‘preparation’ years: students are educated from the outset in the engineering professions, exposing them to interdisciplinarity and the resolution of specific engineering problems.

New courses are planned to be introduced from the start of the 2021 academic year in the first and third years. How will the project be organised? What will its scope be?

This deadline of the 2021 academic year is set by the arrival of holders of the new baccalaureate, who will not have received the same secondary education as our current students. Education models will therefore have to be comprehensively adapted. Although the timescale is tight, this is the right time to implement the desired developments in the areas of SD&SR and digital technology.

Furthermore, for these changes to be part of a programme approach, the progression of learning over the five years of the course must be considered from the outset. This therefore involves all education departments. We also want third-year courses to change from the start of the 2021 academic year (without waiting for the arrival of students with the new baccalaureate) so that as many students as possible can benefit as quickly as possible from improved education in SD&SR and digital technology.

It is therefore an ambitious project, which will require a lot of involvement from the teaching staff. There are already many willing lecturers, but more will have to be trained, and we will have to prove that the timetable reductions applied to certain ‘core’ subjects will represent a gain rather than a loss to the overall quality of education. Dialogue with students will be essential in this respect: they are the first to call for change and they have very relevant comments and suggestions. From an operational point of view, a steering and coordination committee will soon be set up, led by Nicolas Freud, who has been appointed project manager. This committee will have a major role to play in organising the project, in close collaboration with all the departments and centres. With the support of the Teaching, Digital and Learning Technology Support Unit (ATENA), it will guide and support teaching staff in order to build new courses in each department without losing sight of the overall vision over five years.

With this education development project, how does our institution position itself within the INSA group and in relation to other engineering schools? 

On the scale of a large institution like INSA Lyon, this is a unique project because it aims to educate all of our students in cross-disciplinary topics that have become absolutely essential. The education provided at INSA group institutions will certainly move in the same direction as we are, but with the roadmap we have set ourselves, we will pave the way. More broadly speaking, these strengthened areas of education at INSA Lyon will be a differentiating factor compared to other institutions. As an extension of our historical heritage, driven in particular by values of openness and social responsibility, we try to provide answers, at our level, to the challenges facing the world today

Won’t the current health crisis, which is disrupting our operation and greatly affecting us, challenge the smooth running of this project?

This certainly doesn't make things any easier, that's for sure. However, with the reform of the secondary school curriculum, the students who will arrive at INSA in 2021 will no longer have the same background. This factor has been imposed on us. We must therefore implement the desired developments as best we can, despite the current disruptions linked to the pandemic. Changing the structure of the models is therefore unavoidable and we must work on it now, while coping with the difficult circumstances we are facing. Whenever we shake things up, we need the will - which we have - but also the flexibility to move forward as well as possible by relying on collective intelligence.

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