Fundación CEU Promotes Academic Excellence Through Innovation

tudent satisfaction plays a critical role in a university’s perceived value. As higher education institutions strive to improve their quality and their competitive advantage, finding new ways to engage students in the learning process becomes increasingly important.

One approach with proven value is interactive learning, where faculty members become facilitators of the learning process as well as providers of knowledge. Instead of passive learning through the traditional lecture format, interactive learning requires students to become lively participants in the process through discussions, role playing, presentations, case study analysis, and other activities that foster the development of critical thinking. In turn, teachers are required to be more thoughtful about syllabus planning, the presentation of course material, and methods of engaging students in learning.

To help academic institutions develop new interactive teaching and learning models, LASPAU and the Fundación Universitaria CEU San Pablo (Fundación CEU) established the Instituto Internacional para el Desarrollo de la Innovación Académica in January 2006. The Institute seeks to improve higher education by encouraging academic innovation, fostering interactive teaching methods, and honing critical thinking skills in university faculty and students.

Located in Madrid, the Institute is the outgrowth of an alliance between LASPAU and the Fundación CEU, a private educational enterprise that includes three universities in Spain. LASPAU previously worked on behalf of the Fundación CEU to develop and administer the Programa para la Excelencia Académica y la Organización del Conocimiento (PLATON), which has trained over 300 CEU faculty members in teaching methodology since 2004. The Institute goes beyond PLATON to achieve its aims through three mechanisms: teaching and learning workshops, a scholarship program for faculty development, and research on innovation in higher education.

To support the activities of the Institute, LASPAU has designed and developed an extensive website in collaboration with the Fundación CEU. The website, which can be viewed at http://www.laspau.harvard.edu/ceu/, contains resources for university faculty as well as information about the Institute and its programs.

Teaching and Learning

To date, eight workshops and conferences to develop interactive teaching skills in CEU faculty have been held under the PLATON and Institute umbrellas. These include:

• Seminar on the Art of Research (July 2004, Cambridge, Massachusetts)
  
  
• Seminar on the Art of Teaching (July 2004, Cambridge, Massachusetts)
  
  
• Seminar on Skills for Interactive Learning (February 2005, Madrid)
  
  
• Workshop on Interactive Learning for Professors of Social Sciences and Humanities (June 2005, Madrid)
  
  
• Workshop on Interactive Learning for Professors of Business and Administration (October 2005, Madrid)
  
  
• Workshop on Interactive Learning for Professors of Law (December 2005, Madrid)
  
  
• Workshop on Interactive Learning for Professors of Health Sciences (May 2006, Madrid)
  
  
• Workshop on Student Motivation (July 2006, Madrid)

The Institute also designs special programs for specific CEU universities, with the goal of promoting interactive learning throughout the system. One such program, for the Universidad CEU San Pablo (one of the schools in the CEU system), trained a group of faculty in interactive teaching and learning at the Instituto Centroamericano de Administración de Empresas (INCAE) in Costa Rica. These faculty members have returned to Spain and are now in turn training their colleagues.

The Institute also develops programs for institutions outside the CEU system, such as the Séneca Program created for the Universidad Tecnológica Centroamericana (UNITEC) in Honduras. UNITEC recently became part of the Laureate International Universities Group and is working to develop new standards for academic quality. As a component of this effort, the Séneca Program will focus on strategic planning for university change as well as the development of teacher excellence through teaching methodology workshops. An agreement between UNITEC and the Institute was signed in July 2006, and program development began in the fall of 2006.

Faculty Development

The Institute also provides scholarships to faculty members of CEU universities to enable them to pursue graduate degrees in the United States and Canada, giving them the opportunity to deepen their knowledge and skills in their fields of study. In addition, it acknowledges and rewards outstanding faculty members and provides them with additional opportunities for training through active involvement with the centers for teaching and learning at their host universities.

The scholarship program offers two grants each year. The initial grantees, placed by LASPAU in academic programs that began in the fall of 2006, are Ignacio Prats Arolas, a doctoral candidate in music at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and María Angeles Martín Rodríguez-Ovelleiro, a master’s candidate in environmental science at Yale University. In the initial year of the scholarship program, grants were offered for both master’s and doctoral degrees; in subsequent years, grants will only be offered for master’s degree programs. Candidates must be faculty members at CEU universities who have excelled in their teaching and research responsibilities and are committed to returning to their home institutions to reinforce interactive teaching and learning.

Research On Education

The research component of the Institute, which will focus on innovation in higher education, will be developed in 2007 and will be detailed in subsequent issues of the Informativo.