Our Pedagogy

An interactive pedagogy

AN ADMINISTRATIVE AND TEACHING BODY CHARACTERISED BY: LISTENING, RESPONSIVENESS AND AVAILABILITY

Our teachers are also personal tutors. As well as access to a wide range of technologies, the school has numerous lecture theatres equipped with video-conferencing abilities. Students can also learn at their own pace thanks to the online-learning platform, AREL. Our pedagogy brings together theory and practice, and enables us to promote individual talent as well as a great team-work ethic.

A DEVOTED TEACHING BODY

Our permanent teacher-researchers undertake three activities: teaching and following of the students’ projects; state of the art and older technologies; and research. They lead their classes alongside visiting lecturers from the world of business and higher education. The campus directors and managers are also teachers, a great asset when it comes to advising our students during their studies.

A STUDENT-FOCUSED PEDAGOGY

The school places a large focus on the concept of personal tutors: each student is followed by a tutor who will advise them throughout their studies. Classes make use of theoretical and practical work. The students acquire knowledge in small groups and in real-life situations. The engineering students, confronted with these real-life situations, use technologies applied as in the business world, and learn to work with their classmates and colleagues. Individual talent and team spirit merge together. The school also organizes central projects, common to several subjects. These projects have three main aims: a better assimilation of the subjects; improved skills linking different subjects; real-life encounters with project management.

MANY-CENTRED PROJECTS

During the engineering curriculum, we instill our students with know-how (savoir-faire) and personal development skills (savoir-être). In French, the noun ‘savoir’ is the acquisition of knowledge, or learning; ‘savoir-faire’ is the skills of putting knowledge to the right use in specific situations, and ‘savoir-être’ has to do with interpersonal skills and knowing oneself. ‘Learning’ happens during the main lectures, seminars and homework. ‘Savoir-faire’ and ‘savoir-être’ both are developed during project work. Projects, therefore, have two aims: working on how to put our know-how to good use; and learning how to carry out real projects in the business world. This enables the student to assimilate the knowledge acquired from each subject; to understand the links between different subjects; to move from knowledge to knowhow, via abstract or real-life situation work; to learn how to organize themselves in time and space; to be faced with group-work; to learn whilst acquiring the skills to synthesize.

TASK-SPECIFIC TECHNOLOGY

In the engineering curriculum, each student is equipped with a laptop from the school, with access to unlimited broadband, WIFI, emails and a host server on the school’s site. The student, used to learning with a teacher, can also learn at their own pace thanks to the online-learning platform, AREL. This does not replace the many benefits of ‘real’ classes, but is an added online extra. The school has 4 lecture theatres with video-conferencing technology, which helps to ensure that the teaching is identical between our two campuses, and keeps relationships smooth between the EISTI, other higher education establishments and business partnerships.

VIRTUAL PEDAGOGY AND E-LEARNING

For the last 10 years, the EISTI has been a pioneer in the domain of IT Technologies and Educational Communication (TICE), thanks to its virtual school system, the AREL portal (AREL stands for Atelier de Ressources E-Learning, or E-Learning Resource Service). Any and all members of the school (students, teachers, administrative staff or parents of students in the preparatory curriculum) have a secure personal account on AREL. All information related to the organization of the school and its teaching pedagogy is available there, and is regularly updated. AREL plays a large part in bringing together teachers and students in the teaching and learning which goes on at the school, as well as allowing everybody to access the same material, whether it comes from the campus in Cergy or in Pau.

Digital Learning Space : E-Learning

Collective management of several types of e-learning resources (REL) • Program and program session management • Management of teaching modules • Management and indexing of documents • Management of activities, including homework submission • Management of scholarly orientation • Managing multiple-choice tests • Managing FAQs about the types of resource used • Use of a search engine on all types of resource.

Digital Work Space

- Virtual school: managing internal contact • personal schedule management • attendance registers for each class and student • management of student grades and averages • option for parents to check their child’s grades and averages (in the preparatory curriculum).

- Online editor: there is an online editor to create any kind of text on AREL: text formatting (fonts, bold, italics, underlining etc.) • image insertion • internal and external link insertion • copy/paste from simple or Word documents *creation of forms by users..

VOLTAIRE PROJECT, A MUST-HAVE FOR STUDENT ENGINEERS

At the EISTI, we find it imperative that the quality of our students’ written expression be improved. Sophie Mano, lecturer in Human Relations is leading the Voltaire Project in order to improve the mastery of the written word, a skill which is hugely useful in the professional life and development of our graduates.

The Voltaire Project is an e-learning platform used to train and work on writing skills with a virtual coach. This personalized training comes with an evaluation of the student’s writing. For the first-year students (ING1), the evaluations from Voltaire will be included in the average for the ‘written expression’ module. At the end of the first year in the engineering curriculum, all students will take this exam.

User’s Guide to the Voltaire Project: At the end of the evaluation phase, the software gives each user a specific, personalized training session, based on the grammatical and spelling points with which the user has problems. The user logs in to their personal training space with their individual details, on the website www.projet-voltaire.fr. They can in this way train as often as they want, until the rules have been completely understood and taken on board. The service is efficient in terms of time, as the exercises are based on the areas of difficulty, and the user can clearly see their own progression online. In order to validate a module, the student needs to spend at least 4 hours working on the Voltaire Project per semester.

Notre pédagogie