Abstract:

The teaching task in Higher Education represents a significant challenge. Most Higher Education professors are excellent scholars without any training in the competencies required to deal with the complexities of the teaching and learning phenomena. Under these circumstances, Higher Education teachers generally tend to reproduce their former teachers’ teaching practices. Most of those practices consisted in lecturing or some other way of transmission of knowledge. Although this “reproductive” tradition has survived for a long span of time and has allowed most professors to deal in some way with their teaching tasks, in recent years customary teaching practices, mainly those oriented to lecturing and transmission of knowledge, have been put into question. On one hand, current pedagogical and psychological research has shown that learning is most effective when the student is more an active participant in his/her learning process, than when he/she is a mere receptacle of information. On the other, the explosion of technological advances has produced a significant shift in education in several ways. First of all the nature of students is significantly and increasingly different from the past. Moreover, technology has broadened the possibilities for designing new learning experiences, and professors often feel anxious and threatened with a weapon they don’t know how to use. Third, these circumstances have reinforced the need to update teachers’ skills so they can take advantage of the opportunities of technology for designing learning environments that promote significant learning in students.
The aim of this paper is to report on a teacher training experience that took advantage of two of the tools of the so called Web 2.0., in order to improve two main teaching competencies in higher education professors’:
1.Use of technology to support students’ learning
2.Design significant learning experiences
The content design was supported, theoretically and methodologically, by the principles of significant learning; the e-learning strategy is centered in the principles of virtual learning Psychology; and the whole program may be characterized as a competency-based approach. The teacher training experience was carried out in the Universidad Del Valle de México (UVM), the largest private university in Mexico. UVM is a multi campus university system that encloses more than 100,000 students and more than 9,000 teachers in 35 campuses. Additionally, UVM belongs to Laureate International Universities, a world -wide consortium of more than 60 universities in 5 continents. The size and complexity of our university gave us an additional unique opportunity: to develop a global program. In this context, we developed an International Certification Program on Significant Learning for higher education teachers. The program takes 120 hours, organized in six 20-hrs. modules each. The paper gives details of the International Certificate Program, and provides some preliminary results of its impact. Special emphasis was set on learning evidences, which have shown significant changes in the professors’ teaching practices.

Keywords:

Significant learning, blog, webinar, e-learning, virtual learning Psychology, teaching competencies, learning evidences, technology support, web 2.0.