Abstract:

Educational innovation is a strategic imperative for higher education institutions in a global context marked by the knowledge society and its relevance to ensuring educational quality and relevance. In Chile, this is reflected in the requirements of Law 21.091 and the criteria of the National Accreditation Commission (CNA). In its latest accreditation resolution, the CNA recognized the progress of the University of the Americas (UDLA) in teaching innovation, but emphasized the need to further systematize these practices, generate verifiable evidence of their impact on learning, and ensure their transferability.

In this context, UDLA created the Program for the Acceleration of Methodological Innovations (PAIM), an institutional instrument that integrates innovation and research in teaching within a single cycle of ideation, prototyping, piloting, evaluation, and scaling. PAIM introduces two key improvements: moving from individual initiatives to an institutional strategy, and using research as an evaluative tool for innovation within a cycle of continuous improvement in teaching.

Between 2023 and 2025, the program held three competitive calls for proposals, receiving a total of 49 applications and awarding 11 projects. The results point to impacts in three dimensions: student development, with improvements in autonomy, critical thinking, and self-regulation; faculty development, with the strengthening of methodological and research skills; and institutional development, with a strategy for continuous improvement of teaching within the framework of the Internal Quality Assurance System (SIAC).

It is concluded that the PAIM program constitutes a mechanism for transforming educational challenges into validated and scalable pedagogical solutions, contributing to institutional accreditation and generating transferable learning across the university system.

Keywords:

Higher education, Methodological innovation, Quality assurance, Design thinking in education.