TRAINING FOR HOLISTIC ENGINEERS: COMPREHENSIVE ONTOLOGICAL LEARNING MODEL

Engineer education today faces important challenges and demands. They come from students, from markets and from within, as education processes need to be more efficient and effective. Technical and professional knowledge are necessary to engineers' career development, especially in first-time job experiences. They are nevertheless insufficient to address all the relational dimensions at company-level. Skills and attitudes are to be developed for engineers to effectively perform and lead others into meaningful, responsibly-managed, sustainable endeavors. After two-decade-long teaching and organizational experiences, a new training and teaching process was developed based on the traditions of Maturana, Camargo and Flores. This process gave birth to the Comprehensive Ontological Learning Model (MOAI, by its Spanish acronym), which addresses the challenges of contemporary engineer training. This model has been adopted by the Engineering and Technology Faculty at Universidad San Sebastian (FIT USS), and at some courses at the Industrial Engineering Department at Universidad de Chile. FIT USS has its first graduated generation of students following this training model, who were well-scored by employers and internship-supervisors alike. MOAI puts the student as centerpiece of the education process using active training methodologies. To achieve this it stresses the importance of faculty training and learning. MOAI's innovations, practices and postulates stress that teachers must engage with the model, since they are responsible that learning occurs within students. Many of them come from different backgrounds and traditions, and must see and act upon new ones. This is MOAI's main challenge, namely to turn teachers into its first trainees. This article presents the implementation of MOAI in engineer-training and summarizes its associated practices.