Continuing Education From High School to Postgraduate Studies: A Need of Telecommunication Industry in Colombia

Abstract

In the project "Curricular, Pedagogical and Didactic Proposal for the Formation of Technicians, Technologists and Engineers in Telecommunications" (shortly called Forteti) several proposals of professional instruction in Latin-America have been reviewed, as well of conceptual documents published by governmental and non governmental agencies in Colombia, and prospective visions of the country and the region. In addition, experts from technical, administrative and academic sectors have been consulted. As a result, several tendencies have been found, which can be order as follows: first, revalue of the engineer formation regarding from ethical, social and humanistic issues; second, development of student skills for working within groups with multiple disciplines and levels; third, postgraduate studies regarding of the professional upgrade and actualization by means of official courses and self-learning skills development which also leads to the concept of the never-ending in learning and the requirement of establish multistage between the different educative levels; fourth, the need of adequate proposal, management and development of technical and social transformation projects. Forteti research project proposes a profile for the engineer's education which takes account of, at first, the multistage process between engineering and its precedent levels: technical and technological education, because only this multistage process enables the professional and educational articulation that responds to the requirement for holistic projects in the telecommunications sector. As a result we propose three educational undergraduate cycles associated with well defined profiles for each educational level and related with different titles accepted and required for the telecommunications sector. This approach allows us to have a clear Faculty development that fully reflects the needs of our students and the organizations related with the telecommunications sector. Associate with this multistage, the social and humanistic issues have been taken into account as an important factor not for complement courses but as a transversal axe of a curriculum structured by projects or problems nuclei.