Thanks to platforms such as Zoom, Dr. Patricio Valenzuela, who is currently living in Sweden, was able to teach an elective subject for the Civil Electrical Engineering and Civil Electronical Engineering students of the Universidad de La Frontera in Chile.

The health crisis caused by COVID-19 forced us to find new ways of teaching and learning. At the beginning, the distance learning modality brought its difficulties with it, but over time, we learned to make the most out of it, and now, it even allowed the Universidad de La Frontera (UFRO) to carry out a subject 100% online from Sweden for the students in Chile.

The seminar about automatic control systems is an elective course for the senior year students of the programs in Civil Electrical Engineering and Civil Electronical Engineering and was taught in the second semester of 2021 by the Chilean Engineer Dr. Patricio Valenzuela, who is living in Sweden for almost ten years now.

“Due to our previous collaborations with Dr. Patricio Valenzuela, whose knowledge in the industry is very extensive, we started to look into the possibility to carry out a subject in the modality of distance learning at our department, since it would be a great learning opportunity for our students,” explained Dr. Iván Velásquez, an academic staff member of the Department of Electrical Engineering at UFRO, who is the counterpart in Chile.

According to Dr. Valenzuela, who has a PhD in Electrical Engineering from KTH Royal Institute of Technology (Stockholm, Sweden) and who is currently working as the Technology Strategy Manager, Automation, Software and E/E at the CTO Office of TRATON AB (SCANIA), it had already crossed his mind to start teaching in order to share his experience and knowledge with the students.

“About a year ago, we started to plan this undergraduate course together with Dr. Velásquez, based on the interest of the university to establish early links with the industries abroad. Therefore, we created this course, in which we contextualize and deepen the contents related to automatic driving systems,” he explained.

After agreeing on schedules and with the support of his family, Dr. Patricio Valenzuela sees this first approach to teaching as a very positive experience. “It was a very nice experience and personally enriching to start teaching and to collaborate with UFRO. I think that it was challenging for the students that I was not physically there, so it was very important to have Dr. Velásquez at UFRO to support them. But the collaboration was very successful and I hope to be able to continue this partnership through this course and also through other projects in the long term,” he concluded.

Written by:Daphne Bormann Parada
Faculty of Engineering and Science, UFRO
Translated by: UFRO Communications Office