Sep 14, 2018
Edward Coyle, Director of VIP @ GT, recently presented in an event organized by the new Faculty of Interdisciplinary Studies of the U. Mayor.
"What is innovation?", Ed Coyle asks to a full audience. "Innovation is an inspiration that results in something that makes the world different."
Vertically Integrated Projects (VIP), has been a program led by Dr. Coyle since 1995, branching out to 30+ universities around the world. Thus, his talk, organized by the Faculty of Interdisciplinary Studies at U. Mayor, focused on explaining this global model, which is based on the formation of work teams, created according to the requirement of institutional academics and integrated by undergraduate and graduate students, from different disciplinaries, with the aim of working on a specific project.
Ed Coyle says, "In universities there are three types of barriers [that] generate exclusion. The first one refers to fragmentation by time, and mainly affects students, who must consume a large part of their day in undergraduate tasks. The second is fragmentation by mission and refers to the impediments that teachers and older students have to make their functions compatible. And the third, is the fragmentation by discipline which is related to the problems that exist between the different ways of thinking and the lack of multidisciplinary groups".
That is why Georgia Tech aimed to encourage the creation of these teams, which today total 62, integrating almost a thousand students. In addition, the idea has already been replicated and articulated in 30 global institutions.
After visiting U. Mayor in Chile, VIP sites have begun there in addition to new sites at Federico Santa Maria Technical University and Universidad de Chile.
(Ed Coyle speaking to U. Mayor, Chile - September 2018).
