Digital education at UNAB: Cutting-edge technology to enhance students’ academic education

Through state-of-the-art technologies, Universidad Andrés Bello (UNAB) has a Digital Education strategy to enhance the learning experience, level knowledge, train future skills, and add professional value to students, thus providing inclusive and excellent educational training.

To this end, it has incorporated, among others, the use of Generative Artificial Intelligence (GAI), the development of a telehealth platform, the adoption of the Metaverse, the application of augmented virtual reality, and the use of virtual laboratories. In addition, it has continued to promote simulation in healthcare, where it has been a pioneer with its UNAB Simulation Hospital.

In addition, microcredentials in subjects highly demanded by the labor market and Certifications that allow accreditation of knowledge that favor employability through alliances with leading technological institutions, such as Microsoft, IBM, and Coursera.

All this has allowed more than 22 thousand students this year alone to have experiences in digital education, thus putting technology at the service of training. In this regard, Dr. Nicolás Bronfman, UNAB Vice Provost, notes that:

The University has incorporated digital education as a formative pillar. The use of technology is focused on the student, allowing, on the one hand, them to live innovative training experiences and learning experientially, and, on the other hand, the university approaches it in a better way, adapting its training to their needs and requirements.

Digital education is one of the relevant areas of development established in the Institutional Strategic Plan (PEI) 2023-2027, which seeks to further strengthen the educational value proposition by acquiring fundamental tools and skills that enrich academic training and professional development opportunities. Along these lines, Claudia Bascur, General Director of Technology and Digital Education at UNAB, said:

At UNAB, we believe technology can personalize and radically improve education. This means being able to help each student with what is most difficult for them so that they can learn better in a way that is adapted to their needs.

For this reason, state-of-the-art technology has been promoted to advance a student-centered education that enhances professional value and provides the skills required in current and future scenarios.

Simulation in health

The UNAB Simulation Hospital, internationally accredited by the Society for Simulation in Healthcare (SSH) of the United States, has more than 4,200 square meters for clinical simulation at its Santiago, Viña del Mar, and Concepción sites. All its facilities have high-fidelity immersive technologies, such as simulators and virtual reality programs, which faithfully reproduce the country’s hospital and primary care environments. This allows students to acquire the necessary skills and abilities in simulated settings, thus bringing them closer to the real healthcare spaces they will use in their clinical hours and future work environments. In this sense, Dr. Rodolfo Paredes, Academic Director of Clinical Education and Simulation, specifies that:

The Simulation Hospital offers an integrative educational experience of excellence, which incorporates innovation and research in teaching in the training of undergraduate and graduate students, contributing to patient safety.

Metaverse

During the past year, Universidad Andrés Bello incorporated the metaverse in 25 subjects of eight careers of the School of Education and Social Sciences (FECS) to promote the co-construction of learning. It used the Framevr platform, which works in a web browser from any device, to create a virtual world where different types of resources, such as 360° objects, photos, audio, videos, documents, or simulations, can be inserted.

At FECS UNAB, the main focus of the metaverse is to generate significant learning in the students and, at the same time, provide them with ICT tools that they can use in their professional practices and later in the exercise of their profession, understanding that the teacher of the future will have to handle resources of this type.

Along these lines, for example, Psychopedagogy, together with the Digital Transformation Department, created a 3D environment for students to work with schoolchildren and allow them to practice reading comprehension skills, both inferential and related to morphology and the creation of sentences, in an attractive, playful and dynamic way.

This year, the metaverse was also implemented in the Law School, taking the UNAB Legal Clinic to this virtual space. There, it has different rooms where content related to the subjects is displayed, an auditorium where lectures are given to the internal community, and a courtroom for trial simulations where students interact as interveners in an immersive environment. About this initiative, Karen Medina, Director of the UNAB School of Law, says:

The metaverse has been an innovative learning tool that has allowed us to plan intersession mock trials, where students taking the Legal Clinic course train skills in this virtual space before attending actual hearings.

On the other hand, in the School of Life Sciences, the metaverse was used to implement a salmon production plant used by Veterinary Medicine, Marine Biology, and Environmental Engineering students to explore the production system playfully and interactively. Through a computer screen or Meta Quest 2 glasses, students can immerse themselves in an environment that accurately replicates the key scenarios in the salmon farming process, allowing for an immersive, hands-on, and entertaining learning experience.

For Margarita Cabrera, a fourth-year student of Veterinary Medicine at UNAB, the experience was positive: «It gives the feeling of really being inside the system. It is an excellent way of learning without having to go directly to the site». The platform facilitates the delivery of instant feedback and access to additional information that improves their understanding and skills in the field of salmonid production.

Telehealth

UNAB Activa, the telehealth program of the Universidad Andrés Bello, consolidated this 2023 technological platform that meets the highest standards, offering a quality experience for users, students, and teachers. This has made it possible to provide free health care to the community and advance the implementation of telehealth as a resource for learning and developing its students’ professional skills.

The new platform – developed within the framework of the agreement signed with Medismart – has allowed, emphasizes Ana María Cid, General Director of Teaching, that:

UNAB is positioned at the forefront in this area, making available to its community a platform that meets the same quality standards as the most important health centers in the country.

At the end of the first semester, through the new platform, the Kinesiology, Obstetrics, Nutrition and Dietetics, Psychopedagogy, Speech Therapy, and Occupational Therapy careers carried out more than 5,000 free health tele-attentions, in addition to the more than 27,000 services provided since 2020.

Virtual laboratories

Labster is a web interface that provides virtual laboratory activities and has all the elements of a real laboratory. In this way, it allows students to arrive better prepared when having a face-to-face activity, increasing safety, guiding the work outside the classroom, and facilitating their understanding since it shows the results immediately and identifies instantly where their mistakes are.

This platform is used by students from the Departments of Biological Sciences and Chemical Sciences at UNAB and the Obstetrics career. About its use, Andrés Vega, Director of the Department of Chemical Sciences at UNAB, points out that:

We use this powerful tool to complement the preparation and analysis of each face-to-face laboratory work session, guiding the work outside the classroom and facilitating its understanding.

On the other hand, Environmental Engineering students have used the innovative prototyping tool 4Prot to design and build a Wastewater Treatment Plant. 4Prot is a gamification software based on blocks, very much in the style of the popular digital game Minecraft. Thus, through the generation of virtual spaces, both students and teachers can work collaboratively in an interactive space and achieve learning through play.

Incorporating this digital tool allows the development of multidisciplinary projects with high interaction among participants and learning speed, increasing creativity and knowledge appropriation. For Danilo Zuñiga, a fourth-year Environmental Engineering student, the experience was very enriching and didactic:

It allowed a better understanding of the contents addressed in the course through the visualization of the plant structures, recognizing their shapes, and how they work together with the other parts. This facilitated the recognition of possible mistakes that can be made in the dimensioning process since the tool allows working to scale and define the measurements of the plant parts.

Artificial Intelligence

To provide 24/7 support to answer all the questions students may have about the contents of their courses, UNAB developed an innovative Virtual Biology Assistant with Generative Artificial Intelligence (GAI) to provide quality support during the learning process.

This tool is incorporated into Canvas, the platform where the UNAB Virtual Classrooms are located, and to develop it, the Digital Transformation Department and the Department of Biological Sciences worked together with BitLogic, a provider of technological solutions. About its advantages, Lilian Acuña, professor of Cell Biology and Biochemistry at UNAB, explains:

One of the main benefits of using this assistant is to level the knowledge gaps that first-year students bring because they can access this tool, make queries at any time, and get a quick answer when one is not present to resolve their doubts.

This is in addition to other platforms such as Aleks, which has and can be reviewed from any mobile device connected to the Internet. This is linked to the curricular progress of the subject, managing to support the student during the learning process, and thanks to its artificial intelligence component, it can guide the exercises for each student based on their strengths or weaknesses. Felipe Marín, academic and researcher of the Department of Mathematics UNAB, says:

Aleks has meant favorable perceptions by the students concerning the playful and complementary accompaniment to the teaching work, being considered as a support in the leveling concerning the entry conditions of these students.

Microcredentials

To strengthen skills development in subjects highly demanded by the labor market and accredit knowledge favoring employability, Universidad Andrés Bello delivers micro-credentials through alliances with leading technology companies such as Microsoft, IBM, and Coursera. In this way, these companies are trained to prepare professionals for a globalized, dynamic, and demanding world of work.

Among these are the certificates in Data Science Practitioner and Artificial Intelligence with IBM and the certification in AZ 900 Azure Data Fundamentals with Microsoft, which students of the School of Engineering UNAB can access

This year, UNAB partnered with Coursera to improve students’ employability by training and certifying them in the most demanded competencies. To this end, a portfolio of courses was chosen to be integrated during the second semester of 2023 in the Canvas platform for the School of Engineering, the Law program, and General Education. Gabriel Pais, director of the Civil Mining Engineering program at the Santiago and Viña del Mar campuses, stresses the importance of this initiative to contribute to issues related to data science and operations management, among others: «In Coursera, we saw the opportunity to improve in these areas by piloting integrative courses.”

By 2024, this initiative will grow exponentially, covering more careers and students. About this joint work, Dorota Zawistowska, leader of Coursera for Campus Central for America, the Caribbean, and South America, highlights that:

This agreement between Coursera and UNAB aims to enhance the curriculum with international and industry content to develop competencies for students and increase their potential in the working world.