Advances in engineering education in Chile using student feedback
Mario Letelier, Rosario Carrasco, Daniela Matamala, Claudia Oliva, Doris Rodés and María José Sandoval
Abstract:
Two main social forces are causing universities in Chile increase their effectiveness in translating market and political signals into actions in order to improve the quality and impact of the engineering education they provide. Since 2000 these forces have been expressed in government policies of programme accreditation and funding. This national context is exemplified through the experience at the University of Santiago of Chile. The expectations of the workplace with regard to the strengths and weaknesses of engineering education have been usually expressed through the desired learning outcomes of the programmes, many of which address attitudes rather than scientific or technological aspects. From this perspective, the actual developments in student feedback, considered as a significant resource for quality improvement, are discussed. Finally, some conclusions about structural factors that, in both the industrial sector and the universities, strengthen the achievement of the necessary consistency between the country’s needs and university responses are drawn.
Introduction
present and analyse the current situation in the provision of feedback from engineering students in Chile. This is a snapshot of an evolving situation. In Chile, as in many other countries, education has been assigned great political priority as a development factor. This naturally leads to investment and innovation.
This chapter outlines the national context regarding student feedback, presents the case of the University of Santiago of Chile (USACH) and offers some conclusions, including a summary of the advances, challenges and reflections related to the relevance and complexity of making student feedback an effective tool to enhance the quality of their education.
The context of tertiary education in Chile
Chile has a population of 17 million people and has three types of tertiary institutions: universities, professional institutes and centres for technical education. Universities, as non-profit corporations, can offer all levels of programmes, from short technical programmes to doctoral ones. The total enrolment in tertiary education is around 850,000 students, a number that is continuously increasing.1
Most universities have engineering colleges, known as ‘faculties’ in Chile. The engineering programmes are very diverse. The length of their courses ranges from four to six years with variable scientific content. Six-year programmes are mainly ‘civil engineering’ programmes, where the word ‘civil’ is taken as a generic term meaning ‘non-military’. These programmes have the strongest scientific basis, and constitute the main referent for this chapter.
Quality in the Chilean tertiary sector
Two main social forces are making universities in Chile increase their effectiveness in translating market and political pressures into actions aimed at improving the quality and impact of the engineering education they provide. These forces are expressed in government policies of programme accreditation, which started in Chile in 2000. This was accompanied by the funding of special projects, aimed at helping universities to overcome their academic weaknesses. Demands from the professional and industrial sectors have been complementary factors that have contributed to shaping the desired innovations.
In 1990, a licensing process for new private institutions at tertiary level was introduced. This process leads to full institutional autonomy. In 1999, the Ministry of Education started a pilot project aimed at establishing programme and institutional accreditation for autonomous institutions. One relevant outcome of this pilot project was the introduction of the Higher Education Quality Assurance Law, which came into force at the end of 2006. This law establishes that the National Commission for Accreditation (Comisión Nacional de Acreditación (CNA)) must conduct, among other activities, undergraduate programme accreditation, graduate programme accreditation, institutional accreditation, and the implementation of an information system (Comisión Nacional de Acreditación de Pregrado (CNAP), 2007). The CNA is part of the National System of Higher Education Quality Assurance (Sistema Nacional de Aseguramiento de la Calidad de la Educación Superior). It is backed by the National System of Higher Education Information (Sistema Nacional de Informacion de Educacion Superior), which has integrated information related to enrolment, alumni, faculty, retention, finance, programme length, etc.
The present authors have been involved, at different levels, in both government-directed improvements and in exploring the market demands. This chapter describes some general patterns of student feedback management in Chilean universities that have emerged, mainly due to external pressures.
Developments at the national level are complemented by the institutional experience at the USACH. The USACH Centre for Research in Creativity and Higher Education has been in charge of facilitating programme accreditation and curricula development for several years, working closely with the local authorities in charge of this task.
External inputs coming from quality assurance activities and from the professional field have attempted to reflect the expectations of the workplace. There is wide agreement about the strengths and weaknesses of engineering education. These are expressed through learning outcomes, many of which address attitudes rather than scientific or technological aspects (Instituto de Ingenieros, 2005a; Brunner, 2008).
Student and alumni feedback in Chilean higher education
The Chilean higher education system, in particular the university sector, has suffered from the impact of the various forces demanding the use of student feedback in order to improve the teaching and learning in higher education. The greater visibility of students as actors providing feedback on the teaching and learning process has come in response to the exponential expansion and diversification of the higher education system, which has constantly increased in terms of enrolment, creation of private universities and campuses, as well as a proliferation of undergraduate and graduate programmes (OECD and World Bank, 2009).
Higher education policy agencies have read this process of massification as a signal for the need for quality improvement, especially among those institutions with very dubious academic performance (Letelier et al., 2009; Zapata and Tejeda, 2009).
Since the 1990s the institutional evaluation, and later the programme evaluation, included self-assessment processes that required gathering and analysing feedback from students, alumni and employers, which has been based on questionnaires. This is supposed to illustrate the programmes’ academic strengths and weaknesses. Due to the expansion of accreditation experiences, these institutions have incorporated the revision of study programmes and the discussion of student outcome profiles in their agendas (Scharager and Aravena, 2010; Aedo, 2010).
Complementary to these accreditation procedures, another governmental initiative that has demanded more reliable data on student feedback comes from competitive funded projects, mainly MECESUP2 funds. These have aimed to improve the quality of undergraduate and graduate programmes, research, innovation, and university management (Division de Educacion Superior, 2009; Canales et al., 2008).
Although there are no formal studies in the public domain concerning the variety of student feedback implemented throughout these projects, they are meant to provide an opportunity to gather feedback from students who should benefit from each project’s innovations. Feedback is mainly collected through surveys that assess the students’ overall satisfaction with the projects’ outcomes and the application of tests of academic achievement.
At an institutional level, the most widely utilised form of student feedback has been student course evaluations. Although some universities had been conducting these before the introduction of government-directed self-assessment and accreditation obligations, others have only recently started to design and implement these government-directed quality assurance interventions. Despite Chilean universities being acquainted with feedback collection instruments, they face similar challenges to those mentioned in other higher education systems, such as (Gravestock and Gregor-Greenleaf, 2008):
improving information and education of evaluation users of tested results;
developing and testing effective means of reporting results and tools for interpretation (in relation to user needs);
ensuring faculty and students are committed to the evaluation process;
regular review of evaluation instruments based on institutional needs and goals and in relation to current research findings.
More recently, Chilean scholarship on student and alumni feedback has also increased due to research conducted by administrators and faculty members, which has focused on:
the teacher-student relationship (Gallardo and Reyes, 2010);
pedagogical knowledge and performance of future teachers (Echeverria, 2010);
educational differences among recently graduated primary education teachers (Ruffinelli and Guerrero, 2009);
motivation towards engineering and technological careers (Blazquez et al., 2009);
perception of alumni, employers and other actors regarding higher education (Centro de Medicion MIDE-UC, 2008);
educational and workforce pathways of doctoral graduates in science and engineering (Universidad Diego Portales y Universidad de Chile, 2010).
Student and alumni feedback in engineering
Given that Chilean universities tend to function independently of each other, and that there are confidentiality issues that protect the identity of individual students, it cannot be said that the following analysis depicts a comprehensive ‘diagnosis’ of student feedback practices among engineering programmes. Instead, it describes a limited number of these student feedback experiences with the intention of highlighting the main trends and considerations for future evaluations.
According to the experiences of five leading Chilean universities consulted during the research for this chapter, it can be stated that feedback processes have been implemented in recent years, although they have been collected for different purposes, such as self-assessment activities, MECESUP projects, and the Latin American Tuning Project3 surveys.
In general, self-assessment procedures, as well as MECESUP projects, have provided a strong impulse to the exploration and implementation of student and alumni feedback, since these two initiatives are closely related (and are intended to be so). The MECESUP projects have helped to improve the critical dimensions of engineering programmes, and the self-assessment processes in institutions.
Student feedback has been developed in order to make decisions relating to the improvement in the quality of study programmes. Student feedback has highlighted, for example, that student drop-out rates are one of the most serious problems, followed by the extended length of study, or rigid curricular structures.
The most commonly used techniques, in both MECESUP and self-assessment processes, have been questionnaires that explore students’ satisfaction with diverse educational dimensions, such as: the teaching and learning process, infrastructure and educational resources. As for alumni feedback, the questionnaires and interviews aim to examine their employment pathways, average time to obtain employment, average income, and the relationship between the work carried out and the field of study. Both face-to-face and electronic surveys have been utilised.
In general, the information gathered has been used to inform decision-making processes related to the revision of student outcome profiles (according to professional requirements) and the revision of study programmes, according to national and international accreditation criteria. As for the many impacts observed, the faculty consulted perceived positive effects, such as an increase in student retention rates in first-year courses, implementation of active learning methodologies, and improvement in the employability of graduate students.
Despite agreement among faculty that the information provided in student and alumni feedback is clear and can easily be utilised to improve the educational processes, faculty and university leadership continue to be reluctant to make more complex innovations based on this information.
As for the investment in student and alumni feedback, there is no policy on minimum spending on feedback activities. In the cases referred to in this chapter, it varies from less than 5 per cent up to approximately 25 per cent of the project’s total institutional budget.
Neither MECESUP projects nor accreditation procedures have resulted in the development of systematic feedback procedures for engineering students and alumni. Student course evaluations continue to be practically the only systematic means of student feedback which face serious challenges related to, for example, a lack of published results, and hardly any use of the data to evaluate the process and instruments.
As for more sporadic experiences, the Latin American Tuning Project conducted a massive online survey in 18 countries during 2006 in order to explore the degree of importance and achievement of specific competencies in civil engineering. Faculty, students, employers and alumni were surveyed in those countries. More than 3,000 valid survey responses were analysed, and approximately 800 of those were collected in Chile. This allowed a comparative analysis of the most and least important specific competencies, according to the perceptions of the four groups of participants. The results have been discussed in various focus groups and elsewhere, and a book containing the main results was also published. Likewise, the MECESUP and self-assessment initiatives’ data proved to be useful for the revision of study programmes, and provided diagnostic information for the elaboration of MECESUP projects.
Initiatives by the Institute of Engineers of Chile (IIC)
Further initiatives have been undertaken by the IIC, and one of its associated corporations, the Chilean Society for Engineering Education (SOCHEDI). The IIC is a 122-year-old non-profit corporation that aims to develop engineering and engineers in Chile. The IIC has commissioned several studies on the process of professional initiation of engineers in the work context. In Chile, universities provide academic degrees and professional titles. However, there is no professional licensing so far, although this may change in the near future. These studies were instigated as a result of realising that universities were not paying proper attention to the changing demands of the industry on graduating engineers.
Three studies conducted by IIC (Instituto de Ingenieros de Chile, 2005a; 2005b; 2010) collected opinions from employers, recent graduates and final-year students about job expectations and success. In the 2005 IIC study, responses from 39 companies, 211 alumni, and 684 students were obtained. Seven major faculties of engineering collaborated on this study. Questionnaires, meetings and focus groups were the main methods for collecting information. The most relevant findings are listed below.
1. In general, the scientific and technical education provided by the universities is valued, together with associated academic skills such as logical thinking, abstraction and systemic thinking.
2. Many general, or soft, skills are not acquired at an appropriate standard before entering the workplace. These include:
– mastering the native language;
– professional proficiency in English;
3. Some higher-order technical skills are not being developed by the engineering curricula, according to the Chile’s projected needs. The most frequently stated needs are:
4. Development of some higher-order soft skills requires more attention and effort, such as:
The findings by the IIC presented educational challenges which the faculties of engineering accepted as requiring more attention. Complemented by other external inputs and by institutional educational projects, universities are modifying their curricula, fostering innovation and research on education, and creating support structures aided by the funds provided by the MECESUP.
It is the view of the present authors that employer and alumni feedback is currently given priority as a source of quality assurance in Chilean higher education. So far, student feedback does not appear to play an equally significant role. Most university managements tend to take the view that students are ‘not mature enough’ to provide reliable feedback related to the main educational objectives of the curricula.
On the other hand, the government creates policies expecting universities to increase their enrolment so that the growing demand for higher education is met. That demand comes mainly from sections of the population that formerly had little access to education due to a lack of financial means and poor academic background. As conditions improve, many universities face the problem of obtaining a better understanding of the learning capacities of a diversity of students. This is understood as a multi-faceted challenge that requires research related to admission regulations, learning processes and conditions, drop-out rates, motivation, intercultural factors and other aspects. In turn, student feedback on these aspects is required.
The case of USACH
USACH is a state-owned corporation created in 1947, by the fusion of several technical institutions that were distributed around the country. The oldest of these, the Escuela de Artes y Oficios, was founded in 1849. The total student enrolment at USACH stands at 16,500. Currently, 63 undergraduate programmes are offered, together with 14 doctoral, and 37 Master’s programmes.
The USACH Faculty of Engineering is the largest in Chile, with an enrolment of 6,000 students. It has 21 undergraduate programmes, out of which nine are in civil engineering. These programmes are distributed among the following departments: electrical, civil projects, chemical, computing, geographical, industrial, mechanical, metallurgical and mining engineering.
USACH started a voluntary programme of self-assessment several years before the CNAP started the official accreditation of programmes. In part, this paved the way for participation in the official procedures. Notwithstanding, it would be an exaggeration to claim that there has not been considerable internal resistance. Until the end of the 1990s, USACH utilised a traditional approach to teaching, in which lecturers were the ‘source of knowledge’ and students the ‘receptors’, without seeking feedback from students.
During the first decade of the 2000s, USACH has achieved an internal consensus at all levels about implementing a quality cycle marked by clearly stated purposes, coherent activities and investments, measured results and impacts, feedback from key stakeholders, and actions to achieve improvements. A policy document was issued two years ago (University of Santiago of Chile, 2009) with the mission of fostering a quality culture and helping to monitor the application of the quality cycle to the already-defined main institutional processes. The present authors and others within the institution believe that this document is not sufficient to bring about a change in the internal culture of USACH. It is only a step in the direction of change and needs to be complemented by many other approaches and tools.
At most Chilean universities (including USACH), government requirements on accreditation have instigated the process of collecting feedback from students, alumni and employers and taking this feedback seriously. The involvement of USACH in national accreditation procedures started in 2002. Engineering programmes have also gradually entered the process. To date, 21 programmes have entered the process, and 13 of them have already been accredited.
Students are asked to evaluate the relevance of the curricula, faculty competence, resources and management, and other aspects. So far, about 5,000 students and 1,100 alumni have provided feedback. This experience has taught faculty departments several lessons. It was found that there was a general lack of information about alumni and it was difficult to reach them. Students were not necessarily familiar with concepts such as learning outcomes, professional relevance, etc., which would enable them to provide some in-depth input.
An important source of official information comes from the accreditation statements issued by the CNA. The statements for programmes include some statements about the conditions regarding the programme’s operation, strengths and weaknesses, the number of accreditation years (these are in the range 2–7) and the improvements the programme must make.
Impact of feedback on study programmes
The most common way in which students participate, as providers of academic feedback, is as information providers, rather than participating in the full evaluation process. Faculty members are not prone to assign great value to student inputs. Typically, they distrust the students’ capacity to evaluate the teaching. This is reflected in the following remark made in a CNAP evaluation of a civil engineering programme:
… even when students answer questionnaires, its results are not used as real feedback for improving the teaching-learning process. (Comisión Nacional de Acreditación de Pregrado, 2005)
On the other hand, students express their interest in the self-assessment process, but do not always show up when they have the opportunity to do so.
Despite this, student and graduate feedback has made an impact on some study programmes where positive changes in the curriculum were introduced on the basis of suggestions from students and alumni. For instance, in the case of civil electrical engineering, personal development and entrepreneurial courses have been incorporated in order to strengthen the development of soft skills for future engineers. Obligatory internships have also been included through formal agreements with private corporations, and the number of language courses in English has been increased in order to assure an adequate development of language skills in accordance with market expectations. It is important to note that another complementary force that made these innovations possible came from the recommendations of a MECESUP project implemented in the USACH Faculty of Engineering at the beginning of the decade, which achieved an important revision of the programme and graduate profiles. Thus, it is necessary to bear in mind the action of multiple initiatives that act synergistically rather than through isolated and sporadic actions.
On the other hand, the professional pathways of non-traditional engineering programmes have encountered problems regarding their legitimacy in the workforce context and have had to handle their students’ uncertainty about their incorporation into the workforce. The programme of physical engineering had to handle these problems by organising, for example, meetings and events between graduate professionals and students, through which students gained a clearer perspective about the labour market and opportunities for graduates of this discipline, and possible internships for students in private organisations. The maturity of the engagement with student and alumni achieved in some of the engineering programmes has also been praised in their accreditation statements.
The USACH Faculty of Engineering received MECESUP funding for a project called ‘Strengthening of structural capacities at the Faculty of Engineering and its applications to curricula innovation and didactics’. One of the objectives of this project was to create a new educational development unit. Its main goals were set as: curricular development, learning assessment, and alumni follow-up. This has made seeking student and alumni feedback and related activities more official.
Findings and discussion
Collecting student feedback in engineering in Chile is an ongoing process that has not yet achieved a satisfactory degree of maturity. Some conclusions and reflections based on the present authors’ experience, internal and external reports and other literature are given below. They attempt to capture the current situation in Chile but also make some predictions.
Relevance of official pressures, policies and incentives
The change of focus from the teacher to the student is happening thanks to the combined pressures and orientations of many agents. The Ministry of Education fosters quality through the CNA and provides incentives by means of MECESUP funds. The professional field provides inputs related to the desired outcomes of university education. It seems safe to state that without these external forces, the traditional approaches to higher education would prevail. National policies in education are currently being revised, and greater pressure on universities regarding quality is expected.
Professional licensing
Among anticipated new policies in higher education and engineering is the enforcement of professional licensing. This means that university degrees may not directly entitle graduates to perform some engineering activities in the future. Licensing would promote closer links between the faculties of engineering and the professional field, alumni and the assessment agencies.
Value assigned to feedback
The faculties are moving from a minimal interest in student feedback to an increasing awareness of its relevance. Most large universities, USACH among them, have established institutional systems to survey students, alumni and employers in order to meet accreditation requirements. Their effectiveness has not yet reached the desired level. The difficulties associated with obtaining effective student feedback are becoming clearer as institutions gain experience. Such difficulties are outlined below.
Lack of faculty educational competencies
Despite many years of faculty training directed to developing competencies in curricular design, new teaching methods and learning assessment, it was found that lecturers lacked current pedagogical competencies. They were interested in discipline-specific areas such as transport phenomena, project management, mining processes or fluid mechanics; however, they had very little interest in the educational issues. Therefore their learning in that area was found to be relatively minimal, and changes in that area were not anticipated within a short time span.
Contrary to the government and university administrators’ beliefs, the present authors are of the view that to convert a discipline-oriented academic into an educational expert is not a simple matter. For example, it is common to find that after many and expensive training periods, lecturers show a constant confusion of concepts such as abilities, skills, learning outcomes, relevance and quality. Therefore, we suggest that it is necessary to utilise other strategies in order to achieve the necessary innovations.
Communication challenges
In general, there is a significant generation gap between faculty and students in Chile. This brings with it a communication/language problem that has to be addressed. For example, students are often unfamiliar with the meaning of many concepts used when discussing educational subjects. Lecturers, therefore, need to develop a better understanding of the students’ ways of thinking.
The student body is becoming increasingly diverse. Socio-economic background, motivations, gender, geographical barriers and ethnicity make it more complex for lecturers, used to more ‘traditional’/uniform student cohorts, to build a common language with students.
Need for structural capacities
Some of the preceding remarks show the convenience of creating or reinforcing institutional capacities that do not depend upon the good will, motivations or time availability of faculty members. In Chile many universities, supported by MECESUP, are creating educational development units within faculties such as engineering, health and economics. These units, as in the case of USACH, aim to provide ongoing support to the subject-specific programmes in matters related to educational innovation.
Need for engineering education research
Many issues associated with quality assurance and student feedback require long-term institutional research studies (Research in Engineering Education Symposium, 2009). These would collect reliable institutional data that can be utilised in decision making on issues such as: student selection and retention, learning evaluation, curricular improvement, faculty training and selection, diversity, and discipline-specific long-term requirements.
Conclusions
As students become the centre of the educational process, many new challenges appear, some of which may require new institutional strategies. Students’ ways of thinking, values, habits, self-concepts, needs (physical, psychological and social), diversity and academic background have to be seriously explored. Effective student feedback must consider these factors in order to duly capture students’ responses.
Engineering faculties and even universities may not have all the competencies required to address these issues. The traditional academic culture places the professors at the centre of the educational stage, and they usually have a partial and old-fashioned image of learning processes. In Chile, professors belonging to disciplines such as natural sciences, engineering sciences, technology and business, typically look down on educational issues, such as those that are presently of prime relevance.
The national policies mentioned in this chapter are still being designed and implemented at a macro-level, with aligning funding to the country’s educational needs as the first priority. As has been argued here, these policies are generating positive changes in the right direction.
A 10-year evaluation cycle has been completed, some results of which have been the subject of the present chapter. The authors have attempted to summarise the relevant impacts and their relationships with student feedback. It should be expected that the next cycle will address many of the issues mentioned in the first paragraph of the conclusions section of this chapter. Promising signals seem to be emerging from the government’s statements about university funding. Most prominent is the retention issue which, in engineering (and undoubtedly other disciplines), necessarily leads to focusing attention on the learning process and the many factors associated with it.
References
Aedo, A. ‘Acreditación y Aseguramiento de la Calidad de los Egresados’, Seminarios Internacionales CNED [Transl: Accreditation and quality assurance of alumni, International CNED seminars]; vol. 13. Consejo Nacional de Educación, Santiago, Chile, 2010:145–151.
Blázquez, A., Ávarez, P., Bronfman, N., Espinosa, J.F. Factores que influencian la motivación de escolares por las áreas tecnológicas e ingenieria’ [Transl: Factors that influence students’ motivation for technology and engineering areas]. In: Revista Calidad de la Educacion. Chile, Santiago: Consejo Nacional de Educación; 2009:45–64. [No. 31].
Brunner, J.J. Educación Superior y Mundo del Trabajo: Horizontes de Indagación’ [Transl: Higher education and the workplace: horizons of inquiry]. In: Revista Calidad en Educación. Chile, Santiago: Consejo Nacional de Educación; 2008:229–240. [No. 29].
Canales, A., De los Ríos, D., Letelier, M. Proyecto Kawax-Bicentenario ‘Comprendiendo la implementación de innovaciones educativas derivadas de programas MECESUP y CNAP para ciencia y tecnología’ [Transl: Understanding the implementation of educational innovations derived from CNAP and MECESUP programmes for science and technology]. Chile, Santiago: Editorial Universidad de Santiago de Chile; 2008.
Centro de Medición MIDE-UC. Percepción de la calidad actual de los titulados y graduados de la educación superior chilena [Transl: Current quality perception of Chilean graduates]. Santiago, Chile: Division de Educación Superior; 2008.
Comisión Nacional de Acreditación de Pregrado. Acuerdo de Acreditación N° 218 [Transl: Accreditation agreement No. 218]. Chile Santiago: CNAP, Ministerio de Educación; 2005.
CNAP 1999–2007. El modelo chileno de Acreditación de la educación superior [Transl: Chilean model of accreditation of higher education]. Chile Santiago: CNAP, Ministerio de Educación; 2007.
División de Educación Superior, Financiamiento por resultados MECESUP2 (préstamo 7317-ch) Avances de implementación [Transl: Funding according to MECESUP’s results. Advances in implementation]Ministerio de Educación, Programa MECESUP2, Unidad de Análisis y Convenios de Desempeño. Santiago: Chile, 2009.
Echeverría, P. El papel de la docencia universitaria en la formación inicial de profesores’ [Transl: The university teaching role in initial teacher training]. In: Revista Calidad de la Educación. Chile Santiago: Consejo Nacional de Educación; 2010:149–165. [No. 32].
Gallardo, G., Reyes, P. Relación professor-alumno en la universidad: arista fundamental para el aprendizaje’ [Transl: Teacher-student relationship in university: the key part of the learning process]. In: Revista Calidad de la Educación. Chile Santiago: Consejo Nacional de Educación; 2010:77–108. [No. 32].
Gravestock, P., Gregor-Greenleaf, E. Student course evaluations: research, models and trends. Toronto, Canada: Higher Education Quality Council of Ontario; 2008.
Instituto de Ingenieros de Chile. Estudios sobre la Inserción Laboral de los Ingeniero Civiles en Chile [Transl: Studies on employability of civil engineers in Chile]. Chile, Santiago: Comisión de Educación; 2005.
Instituto de Ingenieros de Chile, fitica y Educacion en Ingeniena [Transl: Ethics and education in engineering]. Comisión de Educacion, Chile, Santiago, 2005.
Instituto de Ingenieros de Chile. Analisis de la brecha existente entre la formación y las demandas del mundo laboral [Transl: Analysis of the gap between training and the demands of workplace]. Chile, Santiago: Comisión ingenieros jóvenes, nuevas perspectiva y proyectos laborales; 2010.
Letelier, M., Poblete, P., Carrasco, R., Vargas, X. Quality assurance in higher education in Chile. In: Patil A.S.P., Gray P.J.J., eds. Engineering Education Quality Assurance: A Global Perspective. New York: Springer; 2009:121–132.
OECD and World Bank. La educación superior en Chile [Transl: Higher education in Chile]. Paris: OECD; 2009.
Research in Engineering Education Symposium, Held at Palm Cove. Queensland, Australia, 2009. 20–23 July 2009. Available online at: http://rees2009.pbworks.com/w/page/5952012/Program%20with%20Papers (accessed October 2011).
Ruffinelli, A., Guerrero, A. Círculo de segmentación del sistema educativo chileno: destino laboral de egresados de Pedagogía en Educación Básica’ [Transl: Segmentation of the Chilean education system: career prospects of graduates specialised in primary education]. In: Revista Calidad de la Educación. Chile, Santiago: Consejo Nacional de Educación; 2009:19–44. [No. 31].
Scharager, J., Aravena, M.T. Impacto de las políticas de aseguramiento de la calidad en programas de educación superior: un estudio exploratorio’ [Transl: The impact of quality assurance policies in higher education programmes: an exploratory study]. In: Revista Calidad de la Educacion. Chile, Santiago: Consejo Nacional de; 2010:15–42. [No. 32].
Universidad Diego Portales y Universidad de Chile (Centro de políticas comparadas de educación de la Universidad Diego Portales y Departamento de Ingeniería Industrial de la Facultad de Ciencias Físicas y Matemáticas de la Universidad de Chile). Doctores en ciencia e ingeniería: trayectorias de estudio y situación laboral [Transl: Science and doctors of engineering: study’s pathway and career prospects]. Chile, Santiago: División de Educacion Superior, Ministerio de Educación; 2010.
University of Santiago of Chile. Direction of quality and systems: institutional model of quality assurance. Santiago. Chile, Santiago: Pro-Rectory, University of Santiago of Chile; 2009.
Zapata, G., Tejeda, I. Impactos del aseguramiento de la calidad y Acreditación de la educación superior. Consideraciones y proposiciones’ [Transl: The impacts of quality assurance and accreditation in higher education]. In: Revista Calidad de la Educación. Chile, Santiago: Consejo Nacional de Educación; 2009:191–209. [No. 31].
1The ratio of the number of people enrolled in tertiary education to the total population of Chile is 5 per cent.
2MECESUP stands for Programa de Mejoramiento de la Calidad y la Equidad de la Educacion Superior [Transl: Programme for Improving Higher Education Quality and Equity], which is funded by the Chilean Government.
3The ALFA Tuning Latin America Project is an independent project, promoted and coordinated by universities in many different countries, both Latin American and European.