Creating innovative teaching methods adapted to the diversity of our learners and diving into an ever-more digital world are constant considerations at ISAE-SUPAERO.
The Global Transformation of Training
The educational sector is undergoing rapid change, marked by a profound transformation in demand, both in terms of volume and nature. On an international scale, this change is reflected in sustained growth in the educational market and an increase in the importance of digital skills, including in higher education. Students and their employers are increasingly interested in incorporating hybrid and digital formats, whether as part of initial, continuing, or lifelong studies.
A Turning Point Accelerated by the Pandemic
The global pandemic acted as a catalyst, revealing the importance of investment in digital infrastructures and the resilience of the associated technologies. While the switch to digital environments was necessary, it also showed that simply transferring a traditional course to an online format does not guarantee its effectiveness. In-depth adaptation and specific pedagogical approaches are needed to offer truly effective courses.
Digital Technology and AI: Strategic Levers for Education
The continuing development of digital technologies and artificial intelligence is opening up considerable prospects for the world of education. Mastering these technologies - whether in terms of technical tools, content engineering, or distance learning management - is becoming a key factor in differentiation and competitiveness. These levers need to be approached strategically and responsibly in order to design innovative, effective, and sustainable educational systems.
A Digital Environment Conducive to Active and Immersive Learning
Committed to pedagogical projects such as the DEFI Diversités initiative for excellence in innovative education, our institute has continued to introduce pedagogical innovations in our courses in recent years, particularly in terms of active learning and the use of new technologies.
A physical and digital environment consisting of an IT and communications infrastructure as well as a variety of online services to facilitate the implementation of teaching activities and technical and pedagogical assistance enable us to offer a robust and high-performance environment.
This environment enables us to develop teaching innovations using digital technology both during and outside classroom-based courses.
Our Structured Strategy for Educational Innovation
At ISAE-SUPAERO, educational and digital innovation is a key strategic focus. For several years now, our Institute has been engaged in a progressive digital transformation, based on a dynamic of concrete projects, successful experiments, and a gradual structuring of our tools and methods. Our commitment is part of a long-term vision: to make digital technology a catalyst for educational quality and international openness.
Laurent Dairaine Head of digital and educational innovationA Collaborative Approach Supported by the Innovations Digitales & Enseignement Aérospatial (IDEA) Team
Shared Reflection, Guided Innovation: Our Approach to Digital Learning
Our transformation strategy is based on a dual approach:
- On the one hand, regular exchanges with the internal and external educational ecosystem, including teachers, learners, academic, and industrial partners
- On the other, the creation of new learning strategies by our IDEA team, dedicated to designing and piloting innovative solutions
Our collective approach is strengthening our Institute’s agility, creativity, and excellence in the field of digital learning.
Our IDEA Service
Our Innovations Digitales & Enseignement Aérospatial department is dedicated to transforming teaching methods and implementing different types of pedagogical innovations in terms of training products, digital content, and educational platforms.
It offers a range of educational engineering and digital production services, as well as a range of digital devices for all our teachers wishing to develop their teaching.
Our department also offers educational training in conjunction with ISAE-SUPAERO’s partners.
In addition, the IDEA department manages teaching innovation projects such as the production of MOOCs or other online training courses such as the ST-EX certificate (Environment and Aviation) or a 100% online, essentially asynchronous Master’s course entitled ‘Sustainable Aviation.’
The Missions of Our IDEA Team
- To support pedagogical innovation for all the courses offered by ISAE-SUPAERO
- Implement engineering to produce digital educational resources, modules, and hybrid and distance learning programmes
- Carry out studies and monitor research and development into digital technologies linked to teaching (EdTech)
- Contribute to campus development in terms of physical infrastructure for teaching and digital services
The 4 Pillars of Our Digital Transformation for Education
This theme echoes the 'Industry 4.0' movement. The main challenge is to make our ISAE-SUPAERO environment conducive to educational innovation using digital technology, by acting on the levers provided by our campus, facilities, technologies, teaching platforms, and our Institute's human resources.
The challenge here is to organise production on an institutional basis and to build up a capital of specialised digital teaching resources in our fields of expertise. In particular, we need to strengthen the engineering of digital content production by integrating the constraint of re-use, so that we can use it in the various methods offered in our training courses (face-to-face or distance learning, synchronous or asynchronous). It also means enabling learners to benefit from a large catalogue of content developed by ISAE-SUPAERO and our partners and integrating its use into different training programmes.
The development of digital courses has seen phenomenal growth in recent years. The internationalisation of trade and the ease with which information can be circulated via the Internet are exacerbating competition at a global level within a market that was previously highly geographically segmented, and information and communication technologies have greatly lowered the barriers to entry for new players capable of offering disruptive models.
In addition to the occasional development of courses in the form of MOOCs over the last few years or other formats adapted to continuing education, changing needs led us to propose the implementation of hybrid or 100% distance learning degree programmes. The main challenges are to join the circle of institutions that know how to operate flexible forms of teaching that complement existing courses, to strengthen the presence of ISAE-SUPAERO teaching internationally, and to assess our ability to develop our own resources in this context.
Scaling up, accessibility, breaking down the units of place and time, interpersonal communication, collaboration, immersive technologies, artificial intelligence, active teaching, and the skills-based approach: educational innovation and the use of digital technology are overturning assumptions and freeing us from certain constraints that used to strongly govern teaching methods in our physical world.
The aim of this area is to further develop active teaching methods and a skills-based approach, and to identify, innovate, and experiment with new ways of teaching.
Examples of Changes or Transformations Implemented at ISAE-SUPAERO
The skills-based approach (APC) is a change that concerns ISAE-SUPAERO and all other higher education establishments. Through this approach, students are active participants in their learning. They must be able to justify their choices and adopt a reflective attitude to their actions and approach. Students develop their skills through situations close to the professional world, drawing on resources such as knowledge, know-how, and attitudes shared by industry.
Some courses develop an educational scenario around a project or a problem, alternating phases of autonomy, group work, and educational input.
We are implementing various hybrid physical/digital approaches, for example in the context of 'illustrated classes' with content and/or the use of digital platforms used in face-to-face teaching in order to improve the understanding and commitment of learners in relation to the concept being taught.
At ISAE-SUPAERO, we are also developing flipped classroom approaches, which involve offering digital content that can be accessed independently before the face-to-face course with the professor.
The use of the IREAL (Interactive Remote Experimentation for Active Learning) platform has enabled experimental work to be carried out for an entire year, using the campus's scientific resources, which had been digitised beforehand.
For example, the platform was used to set up sessions in a variety of fields, such as acoustics, with remote experiments on sound propagation phenomena, as well as in the field of information systems and low-orbit satellite constellations. In the latter case, the students were able to access results from complex processing in a very short space of time, which usually requires several dozen hours of computing. These facilities were made available to the entire class of nearly 200 students, giving them simple, fair, and interactive access to experimental resources.
The pedagogical use of the 3DEXPERIENCE industrial collaborative engineering platform in our programmes enables the development of skills in a context of realistic industrial situations.
ISAE-SUPAERO is working with software publisher Dassault Systèmes as part of a strategic academic partnership at the ISAE Group level to adapt the platform to benefit students by:
- Increasing learner skills
- Scripting authentic situations
- Assessing and monitoring learners' work
- Certifying skills
- Enabling a project/problem-based approach
- Collaborating across the 7,000 users of the ISAE Group
- Developming of multi-disciplinary teaching methods with more than 400 applications from different business areas accessible via the platform
The ALLXR (Aerospace Learning Lab with Cross Reality) project identifies, develops, evaluates, and promotes the use of 3D and immersive technologies to improve teaching activities.
Firmly focused on operational uses, the project aims to develop and evaluate new teaching methods based on innovative XR models (places, scientific installations, or complex digitised systems).
IDEA is orchestrating an original approach to facilitate the development of digital educational resources that can be reused in a number of different educational contexts.
Several platforms such as NaaS (Nuggets as a Service) for micro-learning and the production of micro-content or IREAL (Interactive Remote Experiments for Active Learning) for educational experiments enable this approach to be implemented within and outside of ISAE-SUPAERO.
The EEE system (Evaluation of Teaching by Students) is part of a continuous improvement approach to teaching.
Our programmes are made up of modules lasting from a few hours to several dozen hours. A systematic pedagogical assessment is carried out after the end of each module as part of the EEE: Évaluation des Enseignements par les Étudiants (Student Evaluation of Teaching).
The main objectives are to:
- Provide teachers with a diagnosis to support their professional development
- Improve learner experience
- Make students more aware of their acquired knowledge
- Enhance the value of teaching
- Meet regulatory requirements
Our Innovative Learning Spaces for 360° Learning
Our teaching rooms have a range of different formats – some more or less traditional – and facilitate the implementation of varied teaching methods adapted to the many different learning situations:
- Lecture amphitheatres equipped with high-performance digital facilities: touch screen, full-day video projector, automatic multimedia recording of lessons, remote transmission, in-class quizzes, etc.
- Teaching rooms equipped with audiovisual aids and covered by a high-performance WiFi network
- Active teaching rooms adapted to group, project,or problem-based learning or collaborative situations
- Computer rooms equipped with high-performance workstations and access to software used in the aerospace sector
- Language laboratories adapted to foreign language learning using digital and multimedia technologies
- Specialised rooms and connected scientific equipment to enable the implementation of projects using the latest generation of scientific equipment, such as a high-performance parallel computer or a concurrent engineering system with 3D visualisation and multimodal and tactile interfaces
ACTIVE Courses
Interactive Teaching to Engage, Understand, and Succeed
Making lectures more effective by getting our students more involved during lessons is the main objective behind the introduction of ACTIVE lessons.
Interactive teaching consists of creating time for debate and exchange between students and the teacher during lessons in order to improve students’ understanding of the course content and enable the teacher to evaluate students’ knowledge.
The combined use of appropriate online services, a high-performance WiFi network, and student equipment (i.e. smartphones, tablets, laptops) enables these interactions to take place by punctuating lessons with interactive comprehension question sessions.
Concurrent Engineering Centre
Virtual Immersion to Design Tomorrow’s Complex Systems
In the field of teaching complex systems, and specifically in the aeronautical and space sectors, realistic representation and experimentation remain difficult to implement: costs, equipment, environment, and coordination of the various participants are difficult, if not impossible, to bring together, and are therefore a major brake on the development of realistic learning.
In response to this problem, at ISAE-SUPAERO, in partnership with CNES, we are integrating a virtual experimentation system for space systems (e.g. satellites). Using the latest technologies in 3D representation and multimodal and tactile interfaces, some specific courses use a concurrent engineering centre, an environment that facilitates the modelling, design, parameterisation, and collaborative presentation of space systems in a virtual environment.
Educational Development
Agile Systems to Adapt to Every Student
ISAE-SUPAERO’s courses increasingly include a wide range of student profiles.
While our students always have great potential, their educational paths are different and their needs in terms of educational development depend on each situation.
With a goal of providing personalised learning adapted to each individual case, our teachers offer blended learning methods that combine:
- Digital media for independent learning
- Knowledge assessments
- Face-to-face sessions to address individual difficulties