Faculty Professional Learning: An Examination of Online Development and Assessment Environments - Teaching through Multi-User Virtual Environments - page 79

(a prism) is seen as having many capacities
(facets).

program promotes and facilitates the
fulfilment of the mission of the uni-
versity by developing and supporting
the curriculum objectives and flex-
ibility necessary for university success
through a culture of quality. We pro-
pose two subcriteria or competences,
which we project as a problem-solving
situation. Competence 1: how are the
objectives of a formative program de-
signed? and Competence 2: how is the
curriculum flexibility adjusted to the
objectives of the formative program?
b. Criterion 2. Teaching Organization .
This criterion examines how to manage
improvement phenomena that promote
organizational changes and how to
coordinate and establish a beneficial
relationship between the organization
and its environment. We propose two
subcriteria or competences, which we
project as a problem-solving situa-
tion. Competence 3: how is the con-
tinuous improvement planned? and
Competence 4: how is an effective
communication established?
c. Criterion 3. Human Resources . This
criterion reveals the development of the
policies and strategies (e.g., research
and assessment) of the organization
applied to the field of human resources.
We propose two subcriteria or compe-
tences, which we project as a problem-
solving situation. Competence 5: how

We summarize our online FPL design in Fig-
ure 2, which illustrates principles of CTC knowl-
edge construction. The FPL program focuses on
realistic approaches to solving real-life univer-
sity teaching problems. It creates real classroom
environments that employ the context in which
student learning is relevant; embeds four-phase
capacity learning in an authentic problem-solving
teaching scenery; presents authentic tasks, prac-
tices and strategies (contextualizing rather than
abstracting instruction); fosters reflective practice;
and finally, it pays attention to metacognition and
strategic self-regulation by participants.

(5) Assessment CTC building . The second type
of faculty e-development program focused
on a revised version of the “EFQM
Excellence Model” (Sandbrook, 2001).
Figure 3 is intended to illustrate the key
criteria or assessment capacities of the FPL
formative program evaluation as we see
them. The FPL program content consisted
of six connected criteria to understand the
change and improvement of any formative
program (Alegre & Villar, 2006). The analy-
sis of each criterion included a number of
competences to describe its meaning in
detail. Each competence was written as a
four-phase online lesson structure:
a. Criterion 1. Formative Program . This
criterion analyses how the formative

Table 1. Topics used in authors' faculty e-development program courses

Basic course capacities Minicourse professional competences Program Design

Twenty curriculum and teaching capacities
Twelve assessment capacities

Teaching portfolios
Self-assessment
Mentoring
Educational innovation
Teaching program
Program evaluation
Assessment capacity building

Needs assessment Determining goals and
objectives
Lesson design
Choosing educational strategies
Moodle modules