Education promotes the A.0 campus with the implementation of digital classrooms in VT centers - Aragón Digital

The Department of Education continues with its strategy of extension of the digital campus A.0, a whole set of initiatives that have as their objective the transformation and modernization of the Professional Training of the Community. Added to the new degrees and specialization courses launched related to new technologies and the new employment niches linked to them, is the effort to digitize the centers that offer the growing VT offer in Aragon. And, within this last objective, the Autonomous Government opens nine classrooms of applied technology, one for each integrated VT center, which have involved the disbursement of almost half a million euros. The investment has been co-financed by the Ministry of Education and Vocational Training and the European funds of the Recovery and Resilience Mechanism, Next Generation EU.

The Aragonese Minister of Education, Felipe Faci, and the Minister of Education and FP, Pilar Alegría, visited one of these classrooms, called Ateca, at the Cpifp Corona de Aragón, one of the integrated centers of the Community, that is to say , which only offer Vocational Training titles. During the meeting, Faci and Alegría were able to observe the functionality of these new spaces, designed for learning, and which include furniture and digital technology for use across the different professional sectors, cutting-edge audiovisual technology, ultra-fast connectivity, equipment for additive manufacturing with 3D printers and scanners, as well as elements of virtual reality and the internet of things. In addition, each center complements this basic equipment with other technologies directly linked to their sectors of professional activity.

"The classrooms have been equipped with furniture and technology specifically designed to make this space an engine of applied innovation, both in the center and in the companies around it," said Faci, who pointed out how these digital classes will serve to change the educational paradigm, since they favor collaborative learning, while teaching students the technologies that will be found in the future labor market. "Our purpose is to continue promoting the digital campus -Faci has advanced- and, in fact, we are going to continue equipping educational centers with these digital classrooms". In this sense, he has reported that during this academic year and the next, the implementation of 27 of these Ateca classrooms in VT centers will be completed, with an investment that will exceed one and a half million euros.

During this visit, the minister and the counselor have been able to verify the functionality of the new space, in which students and teachers of the training cycle of the higher degree of Building Projects have shown them their work with the augmented reality equipment. Precisely, this experience for the integration of virtual reality in the learning process has been one of the 16 that different educational centers have shown as an innovative experience during the III Congress of Educational Innovation organized by the Government of Aragon during this weekend.

"VET is at the forefront of innovation," said the counselor, who has put Cpifp Corona de Aragón itself as an example of the VT model that Aragón is implementing within the digital campus A.0. "We have more than 60 training cycles linked to A.0., which try to help students learn to develop skills and do not focus on content", he stressed. This way of working together with the promotion of dual vocational training, thanks to the collaboration with the company, represents the definitive impulse of this digital campus.

The Cpifp Corona de Aragón currently participates in various applied innovation and knowledge transfer projects, some of them financed by the Government of Aragón and others by the Ministry of Education and Vocational Training.

The technological classrooms are not the only spaces that incorporate state-of-the-art technologies in this integrated center in Zaragoza. During their visit, the minister and the counselor were also able to see the industrial chemical and instrumental analysis laboratories, equipped with hardware and software for carrying out physical, chemical and microbiological analyses, gas chromatography, PCR analysis, HPLC and others. . They have also seen the mechanical manufacturing classroom, which has a very wide range of machines both manually controlled and numerically controlled (CNC). This equipment has been updated by the Government of Aragon during the last two years with the acquisition of new cutting-edge CNC milling machines, lathes and machining centers.

During the tour, they have also learned about the work of the Leader company, located in one of the spaces of the Cpifp Corona de Aragón business incubator and created by David Sierra, a former student of this center. The Government of Aragon has been promoting entrepreneurship in Vocational Training centers for more than 20 years, a boost reinforced during this course with the creation of professional entrepreneurship classrooms in 21 educational centers, another action linked to the FP Modernization Plan , which has the support of the Ministry of Education and Vocational Training and the Next Generation EU European funds.

During the visit, and before a meeting with businessmen, both the minister and the counselor highlighted the gradual increase in VT students in Aragon and Spain, and pointed to the new VT law as a fundamental tool that will contribute to its development. "The new law - Faci has declared - includes something fundamental: that training itineraries of students can be developed, and recognition of qualification through experience".

Dual VET

One of the goals outlined by the V Aragonese Vocational Training Plan, approved this year by the DGA together with the social agents, is the extension of dual FP, a training modality in which training is combined with paid work in a company in the sector, as one more method to increase their employability. In this sense, this year 38 students from the Cpifp Corona de Aragón participate in the dual modality, which is offered in five higher-level training cycles: Industrial Mechatronics, Production Programming in Mechanical Manufacturing, Building Projects, Industrial Chemistry and Administration and finance. The students have been hired by different companies, whose representatives have held a meeting with the minister.

Since the launch of dual VT in Aragon in the 2013/2014 academic year, with only two projects and a dozen students, this educational model has evolved to reach annual values ​​close to 300 students and 70 projects during the last three years. years. In the 2021/2022 academic year, the initial number of dual students amounts to 382 students, while the number of companies committed to dual training exceeds 220. The training centers that participate in this educational modality are 35, from 14 different professional families .

Vocational Training is experiencing a real boom in the Community, and it is expected that this year there will be more than 26,000 enrolled students, a figure that has increased by 30% since 2015, when 20,000 enrolled were not reached. In Aragon there are a total of 102 centers supported by public funds in which some type of vocational training cycle is offered. In all these centers you can study more than 130 cycles, from a total of 23 professional families, of the 26 existing in the FP catalog throughout the country.

Vocational training has become in Aragon a motor for the future thanks to an ambitious offer that reaches the entire territory, closely linked to the productive sectors of the areas in which it is established, with close collaboration with the business fabric to guarantee employability and cover the demands of jobs, and very innovative.