The Association of Structural Engineers of Argentina chooses an innovative path to train its members

Before the pandemic emerged as a barrier to face-to-face attendance, a group of young engineers had already adopted a virtual campus that would allow them to overcome this great challenge and also discover new training opportunities.

In 2018, the young professionals in charge of training at the Asociación de Ingenieros Estructurales (AIE), or Association of Structural Engineers, in Argentina embarked upon an innovation strategy to be able to offer better services to their members. Determined to overcome the resistance at that time towards online education, they embraced a hybrid system of mixed courses that would allow them to have the best of both worlds.

Even before the pandemic, their efforts paid off. And then, in the midst of the COVID-19 response, they were able to offer on-demand courses through their exclusive virtual campus that they were able to monetize in a few days, providing the association with essential income.

By 2017, the AIE already had a long tradition of delivering training. At that time, all the courses were held in an auditorium in Buenos Aires, where the professionals came together for two or three-day training sessions. The courses aroused great interest among members from elsewhere in the country, who could not always travel to the capital to participate in these activities.

"This caused us to investigate new training models, which would allow our continuous training proposal to be accessible to all professionals in the field," says Emilio Reviriego, who coordinated the tasks of the Courses and Seminars Committee.

As it is a non-profit association, for which its members work pro bono while carrying out other activities, the solution to be implemented had to offer high performance, availability and flexibility, all at an affordable cost, which could be supported by the amount of the fees and registrations for courses.

As an additional challenge, the profile of the association's membership showed a significant generational gap, with one group of professionals aged between 30 and 45 years of age, and another aged over 65 years of age, which was less accustomed to using new information technologies. The new training platform had to be user friendly, simple and easy to use.

As a first measure, the AIE decided to develop a hybrid model, which would hold face-to-face sessions to stimulate the creation of networks among its members and, at the same time, offer a live broadcast to the rest of the country. Later, the COVID-19 pandemic would arrive bringing new challenges.

Already in search of new formats to allow it to include distance learning within its offer, the AIE made its first contacts with service providers. Emilio Reviriego recalls some initial frustration because the proposals they received were too limited or too rigid, without the flexibility and scalability that they required for their platform.

“Although our technological knowledge was limited, we were clear on a conceptual level what we wanted; basically, to reproduce the live course with good image and sound quality, ensure connectivity and add some options for interaction with attendees, such as question and answer sessions, surveys, delivery of materials and certificates”, adds Mariano Travaglia, Chair of the Conference Committee.

“We received some references about Open edX technology and that is how we came to Aulasneo, who gave us an immediate response, and had a great attitude, and a platform of virtual training services that could be easily adapted to our organization and our courses,” continues Reviriego.

The virtual campus developed by Aulasneo does not require physical equipment, but all its infrastructure and services are mounted on the AWS cloud. It uses Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) as a server and some storage units from Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3).

“From the very beginning, we felt supported by Aulasneo and AWS. This is essential for an association like ours, where we do not have a technology department or the time to incorporate this knowledge. They are in charge of identifying opportunities for improvement and making the appropriate suggestions”, notes Reviriego.

With the implementation of the new platform, the demand for online courses grew rapidly to exceed that of face-to-face courses. On average, the ten sessions that were held annually in the auditorium drew around 40 attendees. The streaming arrangement started off with 15 or 20 people, which soon grew to 40 or 50, and reached more than 100 at times. This experience was very stimulating for the AIE.

In addition, as the call for streaming increased and the virtual format was installed with all the features that enriched learning, interest in accessing recordings of the courses also grew. Perhaps the turning point was a seminar held at the end of 2019 with a new format: a speaker from Madrid, a table of professionals in the Buenos Aires auditorium, and more than 100 attendees across the country. After the success of this conference and with the consent of the speakers, this course was the first to be made available via on-demand.

Soon after, the COVID-19 pandemic spread throughout the world and had a significant impact on activity. However, the virtual campus was prepared to offer training on demand. It was only necessary to edit some already content that had already been recorded and upload it to the platform so professionals could access it through the electronic commerce module using Amazon Lightsail. And the new courses were 100% structured for their online version.

“Without this platform and this infrastructure of cloud services, none of this would have been possible. I inherited a system that worked perfectly and the transition occurred naturally”, says Carolina Fainstein, who has served since then as the coordinator of the Courses and Seminars Committee.

The possibility of quickly monetizing the courses being offered remotely allowed the association to generate vital revenue, since it was forced to cancel the 2020 Argentine Structural Engineering Conference, its main source of income for the year.

But Fainstein also highlights other positive results: in this new reality, where physical location ceases to be important, training opportunities are the same for everyone, with the same content, the same methodologies, and the same costs. Similarly, other barriers that the association previously faced in reaching professionals from related disciplines are removed. Additionally, technology enables new formats for courses, which no longer require all attendance to be concentrated in a very limited period of time, which could interfere with other work activities.

The flexibility and scalability provided by the AWS and Aulasneo services coupled with the spirit of innovation that drives the young engineers of the AIE have shaped a virtual campus that is constantly expanding and improving its training offering. The next step will be to capitalize on the experience gained and provide support and infrastructure for new initiatives within the association. For example, the Argentine Structural Engineering Conference, which was held in a virtual format for the first time in May 2021.

“It has been quite a challenge but we are very satisfied. Although it was a different event and there were other complexities at play, much of what we did with the courses and seminars could be reused for the occasion, for which we also had the support and services of Aulasneo and AWS”, summarizes Mariano Travaglia.