THE SCHOLARSHIP OF TEACHING AND LEARNING
Researchers who make a difference in education

by Suzanna Engman

Innovation in education takes vision, research, and an immense amount of hard work, patience, and commitment. Instead of lecturing and asking students to memorize facts or numbers—teaching and learning techniques that, like footsteps in sand leave merely a momentary impression—researcher-teachers engage their students in active learning and research projects. The projects bond the students to their subject, leaving a profound impression on them, contributing to the knowledge-base of their field, and helping to create lifelong learners.

Meet seven University of Puerto Rico, Río Piedras Campus professors who have found ways to depart from traditional teaching, sometimes employing technology and assessment—data collected to answer questions of how students learn best—to innovate.

Research in educational technology

Many countries consider Information and Communication Technology essential to a core education, according to UNESCO. Schools and universities in Puerto Rico were quick to respond to the call for ICT in the classroom by providing the technology, but many teachers and professors were unprepared to effectively use it.

To bridge the training gap, the federal government offered the “Preparing Tomorrow’s Teachers to Use Technology” (PT3) grant. “PT3 was established because money was being invested in technology hardware, but if teachers and professors aren’t trained and given support, they aren’t going to use the technology,” says Professor of Education and PT3 grant writer Juan “Tito” Meléndez. The College of Education at the University of Puerto Rico, Río Piedras Campus provided educational technology training for professors with the PT3 grant from 2001-2004.

The college also purchased with the grant the initial license for Blackboard, a technology that facilitates online teaching and virtual classroom discussion, and invited professors to learn how to use it. And the college implemented the electronic portfolio system, in which students upload academic work such as research papers onto a server, now accessed by the school’s professors and potentially accessible to future employers. Meléndez believes that the electronic portfolio demonstrates the student’s learning better than transcripts with letter grades.

“PT3 has taught us how to innovate. We learned that innovation is not haphazard or serendipitous. Innovation should be planned. It means being clear why and how you want to innovate. We saw that innovation requires an investment in training, support, and time to dedicate to innovation—including time for learning and mastery of the processes,” says Meléndez.

Very few courses are designated in the campus’s offerings as online courses. Is there a need for the campus to offer courses taught entirely online? Meléndez is researching this and other questions about the role of technology in education. In a study funded by the Council of Higher Education, he is surveying which Puerto Rico higher education institutions offer online courses, which courses are offered, and how they were established. “In the field of higher education, we are seeing that curriculum innovation leans heavily towards new course and program offerings, but leans very lightly towards new teaching and learning methodologies. On the other hand, in the K-12 setting, we are seeing innovation in teaching and learning methodology. We understand that they are neither contradictory nor mutually exclusive. Through interviews and focal groups, we expect to explain the forces that guide innovation in these settings.”

Meléndez says the study will provide a picture of the state of innovation in education in Puerto Rico and the basis for public policy. “We need to create a culture of innovation in teaching on our campus. Private universities know this and have taken steps to innovate. But a public university that does not need to work to attract students is less prone to innovate. We have to plan to be innovative. We need to create a culture of consciousness of innovation. To be relevant to a changing society, education needs to respond to change and changing needs,” says Meléndez.

The research team, composed of five professors from four different universities in Puerto Rico, presented their findings at a distance education conference in Brazil. “There is enthusiastic interest in our study because it is providing a powerful predictor for success or failure of distance education and technology-based programs. It uncovers the forces that pull and push a program. But most important, it helps to explain where these programs can head towards and why.”

jmelend2@libertypr.net