WorldCALL is an international association for teachers and educators interested in Computer Assisted Language Learning (CALL).

Representatives of 37 different countries participated in the 5th WorldCALL Congress – the first one in Latin-America – at the Universidad de Concepción, Chile. The Language Coordination Center (CODI) of the Vice-rectorate for Undergraduate Affairs of the Universidad de La Frontera presented a study that describes the perception and attitude of UFRO students towards educative videos for local development in the English learning process.

The coordinator of the Language Coordination Center at the UFRO, Margot Godoy, affirmed that one of the big issues for the majority of universities in Latin-America are the drop-outs and student retention regarding English courses within their training process. “We mentioned in our presentation that, among other topics, at the Universidad de La Frontera we have been able to reduce the demotivation of our students regarding the learning of the English language, since we were able to get to know their needs and interests in a study carried out in 2014. That’s how we achieved to innovate our way of teaching languages at the UFRO. We created a mini-unit for the creation of teaching material, in which we prepare educative videos for local development with the aim of confronting the students at CODI with realistic resources or situations.”

“Our participation in this congress can be seen as part of the internationalization strategy of the university. Therefore, it was important to show our work, which also seemed to be attractive for several other universities, and besides, we generated a lot of networks. At the same time, while listening to other presentations, we noticed that the Universidad de La Frontera is on a world level regarding technology integration.”

Margot Godoy specified that she made her presentation together with Olusiji Lasekan, a teacher at CODI, and emphasized that they also participated in the launch of the Latin-American WorldCALL, what makes them founding members of this Latin-American

The UFRO achieved to be in sixth place in the Universitas report in the Chilean newspaper El Mercurio and consolidates its leading position, although the ranking did not yet consider the institutional accreditation for six years by the National Accreditation Committee (CNA).

The Universidad de La Frontera again achieved to be in a high position in the Ranking for Quality of Chilean Universities, made by the Chilean Universitas Group for Leading Studies in Higher Education (GEA) and the newspaper El Mercurio.

According to the report the UFRO is in sixth position, out of nine higher education institutions in Chile, in Group 4 for Universities of Research and Doctoral Programs. The criteria to enter this group is that the university needs to have an offer of seven or more doctoral programs in three or more fields.

GEA and El Mercurio put a special emphasis on the promising situation of the Universidad de La Frontera, although the ranking was made before the result of the CNA, that certified the institutional accreditation of the UFRO for six years in all areas, was published. The authors of the report explained that this result would have allowed the Universidad de La Frontera to be in fifth place in Group 4.

This way, the UFRO consolidated its incorporation in Group 4 for Universities of Research and Postdoctoral Programs, in which it entered for the first time in 2017, making visible the institutional efforts to create knowledge through research of excellence that responds to the challenges of a dynamic environment, focused on the development of “science with sense”.

In the general ranking for Quality of Undergraduate Teaching in 2018, the UFRO is among the ten best universities in the country, in 9th place. This ranking judges the universities based on four dimensions: Student quality (15%), teacher quality (25%), quality of the training processes (40%), and quality of institutional management (20%).

Written by: UFRO Communications Office
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The Canadian Bureau for International Education consists of 150 institutions for education in Canada that are part of the development of the strategy for international education in the country and that allowed the mobility of more than 35 thousand students, professionals and academics. One of the priorities in Chile was the partnership with the UFRO.

The Chilean Council for University Rectors (CRUCH), the Canadian embassy and Temuco Univerciudad (“Univercity”) were the hosts of a delegation composed of representatives of eight Canadian universities and technical institutes who are members of the Canadian Bureau for International Education (CBIE). Within their tight agenda in Chile, and within the strategy of international education in Canada, they also visited the Universidad de La Frontera.

The purpose of this visit was to generate new exploratory actions in their fields of interest and development with Chilean universities. For Dr. Pamela Leal, the director of the International Affairs Office of the Universidad de La Frontera, this is an important fact. “CRUCH asked us to organize a space for networking and to be the host of the delegation that includes prestigious universities and technical institutes from Canada. At this moment, the UFRO has several cooperation and mobility agreements with Canadian establishments, but there are also others with whom we are establishing initial approaches,” Dr. Leal said during the work sessions.

The Canadian Bureau for International Education consists of 150 institutions for education in Canada – universities ranked among the top 100 by OECD, such as the McMaster University, one of the establishments with the best development and innovation in research, with a leverage of 325 million dollars per year; or other prestigious universities, such as the Queens University, the Université De Moncton, the Polytechnique Montréal, and the Durham College, that are all part of this bureau for the promotion of international education in the country.

Priscila López, the coordinator of Academic Affairs at the Canadian Embassy in Chile, explained that the mission of CBIE regarding Chilean educational institutions is to “create new cooperation networks in different fields in order to promote applied research and student mobility among teachers and students. The delegation was positively surprised by the level of the Chilean universities and also by the initiatives regarding technical education in our country,” Lopez said about the CBIE that promotes the Emerging Leaders in the Americas Program (ELAP) for scholarships to study at universities of excellence in Canada each year.

In this regard, Karen Dalkie, the director of International Partnerships of the CBIE, said that the bureau is interested in “exploring the cooperation possibilities with Chilean universities (…). Such as the agreement between the McMaster University and the Universidad de La Frontera in the field of medicine, regarding which we spoke with the rector, Dr. Hebel, about the possibility of doing indigenous studies, which is a very developed topic in Canada regarding good practices and assessment,” said the representative of the Canadian Bureau for International Education. Besides the UFRO, the CBIE also has existing agreements with other important Chilean universities in Valparaiso and Santiago de Chile.

Obesity in women and childhood obesity are the fields of study of these researchers. Their work will be a great contribution to public health since they are trying to provide more information for the decision making in health in this country.

Two professors at the Department of Public Health of the Universidad de La Frontera each have been awarded a FONIS (National Fund for Research and Development in Health) project in the recent competition of CONICYT (Chilean Committee for Research in Science and Technology) and the Chilean Ministry of Health.

Dr. Teresa Balboa and Dr. Ximena Ossa will be developing important research during the next 30 months. “These FONIS projects allow us to continue with the line of research we are developing at the Faculty of Medicine. They strengthen our work in public health and will have a great impact on health policies in Chile,” the dean of the Faculty of Medicine, Dr. Patricio Valdés, said.

The project competitions in the field of medicine are each time more competitive. Around 240 project proposals have been presented in the latest FONIS competition and only 22 of them have been awarded; two to the Department of Public Health of the Faculty of Medicine at the UFRO.

CHILDHOOD OBESITY

Teresa Balboa, a physical therapist and doctor in preventive medicine and public health, will be responsible for the project “Comparison of pediatric nutrition assessment methods in the measurement of malnutrition caused by excess in Chilean schoolchildren”, which will be financed with about 48 million Chilean pesos. “The problem we want to approach is childhood obesity and how to measure it in our children, for being able to recommend more adequate assessment methods,” Balboa stated.

This project is dealing with the macro issue childhood obesity and some of the reasons why. “We want to determine how exact the anthropometric methods (How do they measure the children if they have a nutritional excess?) for the nutritional assessment in children are. Childhood obesity is a worldwide problem of public health and during the last 10 years the rate in Chile has been increasing. One of the problems to study it is that the methods are controverted because of the use of reference parameters of other studies or of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in the USA.”

Against this background, the aim of this project is to compare the different methods: Body mass index, skin folds, waist size. “Nobody knows which parameter measures obesity in children and the percentage of fat the best. There are no studies in Chile yet, which determine which anthropometric parameter is more precise to determine obesity in our children. We will compare the five anthropometric methods with the gold standard, which is the bone densitometry.”

“It is easy to measure obesity in adults, but not in children, because of their constant changes of size and weight. This is why the methods are controverted: because children grow. It is a great achievement to get funds for this project,” Balboa said.

OBESITY IN WOMEN

“Excessive gestational weight gain: Trend and geospatial analysis in eight years, for the design of technical orientations in pregnant women from Temuco and Padre Las Casas”. This is the name of the project the midwife and doctor in public health, Dr. Ximena Ossa, has been awarded.

This project is based on data of the reproductive outcomes from 2009 to 2016, of women who had their children in Temuco and Padre Las Casas during these seven years. “This project – with 30 million Chilean pesos for its execution – concentrates on obesity in women and we want to analyze the excessive gestational weight gain,” Ossa explained.

“The recommendations of the Chilean Ministry of Health (MINSAL) regarding the weight gain during pregnancy are based on the nutritional status of the mother in her prenatal check-ups, where they receive the recommendation not to gain more than a certain amount of weight. These recommendations are not always put into practice and there are no studies in Chile on how this weight gain should be distributed exactly during pregnancy. We want to know what happens during pregnancy regarding the weight gain according to the nutritional status, but you have to wait until the woman has her baby in order to know how much weight she gained. In addition, we want to find out how this is related to the place the women live,” the researcher added.

Obesity in women is a big problem in Chile and it is uneven distributed in our population. “In other words, and this is a fact that does not apply to men, obesity in women is significantly higher in families with a lower socioeconomic status. The reasons of this are not clear and one of the factors could be a pregnancy, since the changes of weight during pregnancy could explain the obesity. This is what we are going to study in Temuco and Padre Las Casas.”

“We want to find out how much influence the different places of residence in Temuco and Padre Las Casas have on this weight gain during pregnancy and how we can prevent directly, once we have the data. All women gain weight during pregnancy, but the problem are the women who gain more weight than recommended and we don’t have concrete data on that, yet. In 2008, a study on women in Santiago de Chile showed that only 10% of the women who start their pregnancy with normal weight maintain their nutritional status within the category “normal” until their baby is born,” the researcher explained.

“The more weight a woman has when she starts her prenatal check-ups, the more weight she will gain during pregnancy. This makes the problem even worse, but we have to do an even more precise analysis for being able to show what is happening based on real evidence. At the UFRO, we have a unique team of researchers who are dealing with obesity in women and this project is a new contribution to making these problems visual from its basis,” Ximena Ossa concluded.

Both projects just started and will have a duration of 30 months. By then, we will know much more about childhood obesity and obesity in women in the Araucanía Region.