Acceleration in the transformation of teaching methods at IMT due to the current health crisis

In order to ensure continuity of training and maintain the quality of teaching throughout the network during the lockdown, Institut Mines-Télécom, using the COMETE network (IMT teaching support staff), rapidly deployed a series of actions to boost the transformation of teaching methods already in progress and adapt them to distance learning.

Due to the lockdown, teaching has been conducted remotely since 16 March in all IMT schools in order to ensure continuity in education.

The COMETE network (IMT teaching support staff) has put several new measures in place, providing IMT teachers with a series of tips and resources to help them adapt their lessons to be taught remotely.

In addition to an initial teaching guide made available on April 16, a second one will be available on April 27 on remote assessment. A series of 12 webinars has also been created and 8 have already taken place. Five dealt with preparing a lesson to be taught remotely, four with remote interaction and three with remote assessment. These webinars have been a great success, with about 40 teachers participating online per webinar.

Concerning the format of the courses, for example, audio has become a priority as it is highly appreciated by the students within the framework of distance learning, promoting good concentration, the possibility to save files and listen to the material again. To enable students to access the full range of content, IMT relies on various tools such as Moodle, Perusall, Mask, Snagit and Camtasia. Students are offered individual meetings several times a week to answer their questions and complete the digital content.

Since July 2019, IMT has been using a digital educational library for the teaching teams of the group’s schools. The objectives of this platform are to pool, re-use and re-engineer the digital educational resources produced at IMT. Two new sections have recently been added:

• A teaching forum that allows discussion between teachers and the editors-creators of the courses in the educational library.
• A catalog of educational resources that offers tutorials to support the use of Moodle, designed and shared by IMT Lille Douai and the replaying of webinars.

In this period of unprecedented crisis, IMT’s teaching teams are working hard to enable students to continue their studies in the best possible conditions by supporting them through new working methods. In just 4 weeks, IMT Lille Douai was able to program 350 virtual classes. The teaching community is highly mobilized, and has succeeded in meeting the many challenges, for example in Evry, where the Entrepreneurial Project challenge was maintained, bringing together 525 second-year students from Télécom SudParis, IMT-BS and ENSIEE virtually and having them work together in small engineer-manager groups.

In order to ensure continuity of education, schools have also had the opportunity to use MOOCs. In fact, more than 30 MOOCs have been reopened as a matter of urgency. As one of the largest MOOC producers in France, IMT has been offering nearly 50 online training courses for 5 years, accessible on the FUN-MOOC, EdX and Coursera platforms. Two new training courses have also recently been published and are proving to be very successful. The first, on the digital transformation of companies aimed at middle management, started on 6 April with more than 3,300 participants registering in just 10 days. The second, “Dare to Enter the Industry of the Future”, is mainly aimed at young people aged 15 to 18 who are about to make a choice on their professional future. More than 2,500 participants have registered to date.