Pedagogy & Support
Since an engineer’s professional life is not a succession of lectures, exercise sessions and practical work, CESI has chosen to use from the first year a pedagogy close to the way an engineer works in a company : active learning by problems and projects solving, also called Problem based learning or PBL pedagogy.
Problem based learning
First developed in 1969 at a Canadian university (McMaster), this method was at the beginning applied in a university medical school to prepare students for the field. This student-oriented learning was then generalized to other higher education institutions. It aims to develop judgment, pool skills to find a solution, discuss and implement an action.
Throughout your training, you will be required to lead several multidisciplinary projects as part of a team.
To handle a project, you will need to draw on scientific, organizational, human and linguistic knowledge provided to you on an ongoing basis
The subjects taught are more practical, less theoretical and become cross-cutting with projects mentioned as examples or used as a basis for work. In addition, the growing complexity of the projects and concepts studied will support your personal progress towards the engineering level. Once the project is completed and you have assimilated what you have learned, you will be able to use it in other situations. Indirectly, you learn to show initiative, to discuss your ideas with the members of a group, to respect the opinions of others, to analyze a situation.
To implement this PBL pedagogy, classrooms are transformed into multimedia meeting rooms with several desks of six or eight seats. Interactive digital environments, screens and fablabs (fabrication laboratory) are dedicated to the rapid prototyping of pedagogical projects.
This type of pedagogy by problems and projects, very much used in the member schools of CDIO™, allows to train engineers, directly operational, being able to manage teams and complex projects!
Please note: the school includes in its teaching programs courses related to innovation and entrepreneurship, which are very much appreciated by students wishing to create their own business.
CESI is a member of the CDIO™ Initiative
The CDIO™ Initiative (Conceive, Design, Implement and Operate) is a global network of universities and schools created in the late 1990s by the prestigious MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology).
Today, CDIO™ brings together more than 100 institutions. Among them are Stanford and Pennsylvania Universities in the United States, École Polytechnique de Montréal and the University of Calgary in Canada, Beijing Jiaotong and Chengdu Universities in China, Queensland University of Technology and the University of Sydney in Australia, Chalmers University and KTH in Sweden, Trinity College Dublin in Ireland and CESI in France.
These schools work together on the continuous improvement of engineering education and meet to brainstorm on topics in view of developing the quality of the pedagogy used, including PBL pedagogy.