Abstract:

The Universidad de Las Américas (UDLA) has implemented an institution-wide pedagogical innovation aimed at strengthening the adoption of active learning through the formulation of the Pedagogical Script (PSCRIPT). This process emerged in response to a persistent challenge: despite a competency-based curriculum, teaching practices across faculties often remained traditional and inconsistent, limiting methodological coherence and the systematic use of active methodologies. The objective of this contribution is to present the institutional implementation of the PSCRIPT and its impact on the adoption and coherence of active learning practices across undergraduate programs.

The PSCRIPT reframes course design as a structured and collaborative pedagogical praxis rather than a prescriptive document. It guides faculty through a backward-design sequence: learning outcomes, assessment alignment, teaching strategies, and didactic sequences, making methodological decisions explicit and coherent. Unlike conventional curriculum redesign processes that focus primarily on documentation or policy alignment, the PSCRIPT introduces a reflective, design-based mechanism that embeds methodological reasoning into every class-to-class instructional decision. Between 2023 and 2025, this process reached more than 400 undergraduate courses across all modalities and seven faculties through hands-on workshops, co-design sessions with instructional designers, and academic validation mechanisms that involved iterative peer review, alignment verification, and approval by program-level academic committees.

Analysis of the resulting PSCRIPTs demonstrates a significant diversification in the use of active methodologies: collaborative learning (77%), problem- and case-based learning (68%), project-based inquiry (36%), research-based learning (36%), gamification (23%), and flipped classroom strategies (15%). Faculty feedback collected through institutional surveys administered online at the end of each implementation cycle shows a sustained increase in perceived methodological clarity and coherence, with agreement levels rising from 69% (2023–2024) to 95% in 2025.

The experience indicates that meaningful pedagogical innovation requires guided institutional processes that build shared language, reflective practice, and coherent design decisions. The PSCRIPT has proven to be a flexible, scalable, and transferable model capable of fostering active learning at a curricular scale. Future steps include strengthening classroom-level impact monitoring and expanding faculty-development initiatives to consolidate long-term pedagogical transformation.

Keywords:

Pedagogical Innovation, Reflective Teaching, Instructional Design, Active Learning, Curriculum Development.