Facing post-pandemic challenges in engineering education: Promoting global collaborations in Latin America

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic posed great challenges for Engineering Education. For Latin America higher education institutions, the greatest changes were total virtuality, distance education, collaborations between educational entities, labs, and connectivity problems. The return to in-person attendance has brought new challenges to engineering schools, such as the low motivation of teachers and students in this new transition, as well as the possible lags of students in the acquisition of practical skills that online laboratories and digital courses could not develop. Additionally, other related organizations, such as professional or educational societies faced challenges such as retention of members, running virtual conferences, and maintaining fiscal viability. The main objective of this work is to make known the challenges in Engineering Education in the post-pandemic era in Latin America, the initiatives the nonprofit Latin American and Caribbean Consortium of Engineering Institutions (LACCEI) has developed to address these challenges and promote best practices so that Engineering Education institutions in Latin America can face them, and the need to scale these initiatives through collaboration among academic, gobernmental, industry and organizations.