The creation of an European Space for Higher Education is giving an impulse to various initiatives attempting to ease the transition from university learning to a more competitive teaching model, focusing on innovation and creativity.

However, it is teachers and teaching groups that, within a teaching environment, are truly responsible for stimulating the teaching community and improving its quality.

From that perspective, the Universidad Politécnica de Madrid (UPM) promotes various initiatives for its professors that support innovative teaching, while paying special attention to training with new teaching methods from the European Space for Higher Education. One of these initiatives is the organization of the Awards for Teaching Excellence, Innovative Teaching and Teaching Innovation Groups (TIG).

Two prizes will be awarded within the category for “Teaching Excellence”, recognizing the work of those UPM professors who have carried out their teaching methods for, at least, twenty years. There will be 10,000 euros for each of the two prizes.

The objective of the “Innovative Teaching” category is to distinguish those professors who have stood out in the development of innovative teaching activities uninterruptedly during the past five years, rewarding them with eight 3,000 euro prizes.

The deadline for these two award categories passed on May 25th 2009, but registration is still open in a third category:

Four prizes are being awarded to Innovative Teaching Groups (ITG) at UPM, for groups working on innovative teaching projects organized by UPM or outside of the university, for the publication of results obtained in scientific journals, assistance to conventions, seminars, etc…, deadline for registration for these awards is September 7th 2009.

Activities valued for the awards are, among others, the promotion of teaching centered around the student, the support of active teaching methods, curricular development, the creation and coordination of teaching groups, teaching programs, student support, taking full advantage of the possibilities offered by TIG, Research and Development projects and all activities promoting internationalization.

This entry was posted on Saturday, 27 de June de 2009 at 1:05 am and is filed under Ideas. You can track comments on this feed RSS 2.0. You can leave a comment or trackback from your own site.