The award ceremony, realized in cooperation with the Consortium for Academic Innovation 'STHEM Brasil', took place on 27 June 2024, during the seminar 'The Admirable Future of Higher Education'.
The winning project presented the development of an application to assess the socio-emotional skills of UniSales students. Through the application, UniSales students will be able to monitor and assess the development of their social-emotional skills during their degree course, enabling them to develop soft skills that are increasingly relevant and sought-after in today's modern labour market.
For the Dean of UniSales, Prof. Carmen Luiza, the result certifies the good pedagogical model of UniSales and the correct attribution of the value of socio-educational skills training. "We are aware that the labour market does not only require technical skills, but above all socio-emotional skills. For us, this award is an acknowledgement that we are very much in line with the recognized needs of higher education and the labour market," he said.
Prof. Luiza also said that the award is a further incentive to open up new perspectives and initiatives for the development of students' socio-emotional skills. "This award gives us a glimpse of the possibility of even more transformative paths, of what can be achieved to innovate the structure of socio-emotional development in education," she added.
Prof. Alexandre Cardoso Aranzedo, Academic Vice-Chancellor of UniSales, developed the methodology behind the application, together with his fellow lecturer in the UniSales Psychology course, Prof. Christyne Gomes Toledo. Acknowledging the importance of the ecosystem linked to Semesp, which has long worked to develop and monitor initiatives aimed at innovation in education in Brazil and around the world, Prof. Cardoso Aranzedo emphasized that the methodology responds to the need to develop the socio-emotional skills of young people, which are currently one of the great needs of the labour market, as highlighted in various studies such as the World Economic Forum's “The Future of Jobs Report 2023.
"We are an institution that trains professionals for this market and, almost five years ago, we recognized this need and changed the pedagogical proposal to train professionals to develop not only the necessary technical skills but also social-emotional skills," explained the Academic Vice-Chancellor of UniSales.
The methodology envisaged by the socio-emotional pathway provides for moments of self-assessment, assessment of the student by peers and assessment by the groups to which the student belongs, all in anonymity, minimizing the possibility of an assessment contaminated by the possibility of embarrassment. Assessments are divided into ten macro-competencies.
At the operational level, the application was developed by Marcelo Albuquerque Schuster, UniSales' technology course coordinator, together with the students of the course, through the Salesian university's 'Software Factory'.
The Prize for Innovation in Higher Education 'Prof. Gabriel Mário Rodrigues' was created by Semesp to honour professionals working in this field in Brazilian society, and is in recognition of Prof. Gabriel Mário Rodrigues, a notable educational pioneer and one of the main people responsible for the prominent position achieved by the private higher education system in the country.
Source: Salesianos BBH
