When Waleska Crespo Rivera was appointed president of the Universidad Central del Caribe in 2018, she sought to focus on promoting the quality of UCC’s educational programs. As UCC’s first private medical school to be incorporated under the laws of the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico, UCC has evolved into a health-sciences university with fully accredited academic programs in Medicine, Doctor of Chiropractic, Medical Images Technology, Biomedical Sciences, and Substance Abuse Counseling.

“We prepare the doctors, scientists, and health care professionals to serve their communities in Puerto Rico and beyond,” says President Crespo Rivera. “Our faculty are experts in their fields, but we wanted to ensure they were also equipped and supported for their role as educators.”

To ensure faculty were fully prepared to continue this mission during the pandemic, President Crespo Rivera turned to ACUE. Through UCC’s Faculty Development Office, and supported by the Office of the Dean of Academic Affairs, UCC is the only higher education institution in Puerto Rico to have most of its faculty earn an ACUE Certificate.

Earlier this year, UCC held a pinning ceremony to celebrate all ACUE Certified faculty.

Dr. Nereida Diaz, Dean of Academic Affairs who became ACUE Certified as part of UCC’s inaugural cohort in 2020-21, praised UCC’s faculty’s collaboration, feedback and dedication that has contributed to UCC’s Faculty Development program.

“ACUE has helped us build a culture of professional practice that is focused on teaching and learning excellence,” said Dr. Diaz. “Participating in the course helped me learn about new evidence-based techniques but also gave me a better perspective for our students.”

Accreditation + Quality + ACUE 

UCC’s commitment to teaching excellence begins at the top, with President Crespo Rivera, who is an ACUE coursetaker herself and has completed 10 modules. She plans to earn the full ACUE certificate, in part as a way to promote and encourage other faculty to join upcoming cohorts.

“Earning your ACUE pins today represents a commitment not only to helping UCC’s students succeed, but also to your own lifelong pursuit of learning,” added President Crespo Rivera.

ACUE institutional partnerships, with their focus on quality and measurable impact for students, has played a critical role in the accreditation process for several colleges and universities and UCC is not the exception.

President Crespo Rivera said that as a medical and health professions institution, UCC is subject to several accreditation processes (institutional and programmatic). ACUE, she said, helped UCC successfully navigate multiple evaluation processes, including the Middle States Commission on Higher Education (MSCHE), which granted UCC with institutional accreditation through 2027-2028 and reaffirmed UCC’s excellence in education programs for UCC students.

Celebrating the Role of Faculty

At the pinning ceremony, ACUE Academic Director Dr. Barbara Rodriguez said she was inspired by the reflections shared by medical doctors, scientists and faculty, and their excitement for their roles as educators. “I appreciated seeing and hearing medical doctors talk about teaching and learning with such appreciation and enthusiasm,” Rodriguez said.

Faculty participated in a “table talk” activity with colleagues and shared “ah-ha!” moments from their ACUE experience.

Faculty shared how ACUE-recommended practices such as the jigsaw technique, Start-Stop-Continue, and facilitating small-group work were among some of the impactful techniques discussed.

One faculty member, Dr. Jose Oliver, shared how observing colleagues recorded microlectures inspired him to adjust his approach to engaging students in an online environment.

“This course was so important for my work as a teacher,” said Oliver. “We are experts in our fields, but we are not trained to teach. ACUE has provided me with the tools necessary to help UCC students develop in the classroom.”

Want to learn more? Find out how you can bring ACUE to your campus.

A syllabus is a critical component of every class, providing students with key information and expectations. However, an overloaded syllabus can be intimidating or overwhelming, which is what licensed educational psychologist and nationally certified school psychologist May Nguyen learned while taking ACUE’s “Preparing an Effective Syllabus” module. Continue…

What kind of impact can a campus-wide investment in quality teaching have on student success?

Today, students at the University of Arkansas – Pulaski Technical College (UA-PTC), are significantly benefiting from the two-year technical college’s all-out focus on quality instruction, according to new research published by ACUE and UA-PTC. 

Using rigorous methods to isolate the effects of better teaching, the research report consists of two separate analyses and examines course outcome data for more than 28,500 non-unique student enrollments from 2017 to 2019.  The findings: students taught by ACUE faculty passed their courses, earned better marks, and received fewer DFW grades in significantly higher rates than students in course sections taught by non-credentialed faculty. They also show that UA-PTC students in ACUE faculty courses experience stronger equity, with an even greater impact for Black and Latino students. 

Learn more about the impact of ACUE faculty at the University of Arkansas – Pulaski Technical College.

Evaluating the efficacy of faculty development and its impact on student outcomes is a core part of how ACUE partners with colleges and universities nationwide. To date, ACUE researchers and institutional partners have published 21 reports on the results of their analyses. The UA-PTC findings further confirm numerous independently validated studies demonstrating better outcomes for students taught by ACUE Certified faculty. 

“The data proves it works.”

To date, 98% of full-time UA-PTC faculty have earned the full ACUE Certificate, the only nationally-recognized college teaching credential endorsed by the American Council on Education (ACE). 

Located in North Little Rock, Arkansas, UA-PTC plays a key role in the education and workforce training pipeline in Central Arkansas. One of Arkansas’s largest institutions of higher education, UA-PTC serves thousands of students who seek job-ready skills in the state’s in-demand professions: allied health, technical sciences, construction trades, advanced manufacturing, automotive technology, and many others.

For outgoing Chancellor Margaret Ellibee, who has led UA-PTC since 2012, the findings validate the institution’s strategic investments in student success. 

“Like so many community colleges across the country, we’ve had to quickly transform ourselves to retain more students and keep them engaged,” said Ellibee, who will retire at the end of June after nearly four decades working in colleges and universities across the country.  “As our top priority, quality teaching has been central to how we are breaking down barriers that stand in the way of student success for all our students — and the data proves it works.”

“Quality teaching is transformative.”

In UA-PTC’s strategic plan, high-quality professional learning and development for faculty and staff are top student success priorities. ACUE’s online, cohort-based credentialing program has been a key driver of this mission, providing impactful opportunities at scale. 

Chancellor Ellibee has been a leading voice on student success strategies across the 22 community colleges in Arkansas. UA-PTC Provost Summer DeProw noted that having support at the very top of the institution has helped cultivate a culture of professional learning.

Through UA-PTC’s ACUE Fellows program, a growing chorus of ambassadors is taking up the torch to build on that momentum. On social media, UA-PTC shares special announcements for newly credentialed faculty, which are amplified by campus and faculty leaders. This year, ACUE Certified educators KiKi Heintz and Dr. Richard Moss helped launch the ACUE Focus newsletter, a weekly publication that highlights ACUE Certified faculty and their experiences with the program. 

Scott Durand, ACUE’s CEO, underscored the connection between quality instruction and student success. The more faculty are equipped with evidence-based teaching practices, the more students “will be able to experience deep learning and engagement that can set them on a path for career success,” said Durand, who credited UA-PTC’s leadership. “Quality teaching is transformative, and we applaud UA-PTC’s leadership for making it the core of their student success agenda, leading to stronger and more equitable outcomes.” 

“A clear return on investment”

Provost Summer DeProw said that ACUE is helping UA-PTC advance institutional strategies in a variety of ways: 

• Corequisite course design for math and English as a Strong Start to Finish partner site
• Training faculty and leadership in evidence-based teaching and learning practices for English corequisite courses
• Securing workforce grant and funding opportunities
• Faculty and staff hiring and recruitment

In a culture that has long prioritized disciplinary or industry expertise, DeProw says that greater student success requires a greater focus on teaching craft. 

“There’s a lot of talk around training faculty to become experts in their fields, but we never teach them how to teach,” said DeProw. “At UA-PTC, we’re changing that by investing in ACUE programs to reach every faculty member to the benefit of every single student. The data makes it clear: we’ve seen a clear return on investment for our students’ futures.”

‘Being an effective teacher’ 

Joe McAfee, who teaches electronics and other technical courses at UA-PTC, has nearly three decades of experience working in manufacturing and controls engineering. With another 20 years of technical instruction, McAfee wasn’t sure what he’d get out of ACUE. 

“I had always thought of myself as an effective teacher before ACUE, but taking the course helped me realize just how much I didn’t know,” McAFee wrote in an ACUE Focus newsletter earlier this year. Among the changes he says he was able to immediately implement into his teaching were: 

• Building more engaging syllabi
• Designing and implementing low-stakes quizzes to assess progress
• Using effective rubrics
• Teaching “just-in-time” math skills and concepts for review 

“In the past, I’d taken several of the online courses that Pulaski Tech had offered for improving instructional skills, but ACUE was by far the most comprehensive and applicable of all,” said McAfee. “Although experience in industry can make one a subject matter expert, that is very different from being an effective teacher.” 

To learn more about how to bring ACUE programs to your course or campus, please visit acue.org or contact our partnerships team at partnerships@acue.org. 

In this essay, Barbara Rodriguez, Ph.D. shares reflections on ACUE’s partnership with Winston-Salem State University, which is part of the “Excellence in Online Instruction” Initiative, supported by The Thurgood Marshall College Fund.

Who says you can’t feel energy and excitement in a Zoom room?  

As part of Winston-Salem State University‘s annual Faculty Festival, more than 50 ACUE Certified faculty were recognized for earning their credential in effective college instruction. The partnership is part of the “Excellence in Online Instruction” Initiative, launched in 2021 with the Thurgood Marshall College Fund (TMCF) and ACUE to equip hundreds of faculty at Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCU) and Predominantly Black Institutions (PBI) with innovative, evidence-based practices. 

Winston-Salem State University is a nationally-recognized institution and a top-ranked HBCU for advancing student social mobility. At the pinning ceremony, Provost Dr. Anthony Graham said the ACUE initiative for HBCU institutions offered an opportunity to serve its student-centered mission by enhancing institutional capacity. ACUE, he said, was “part of our ecosystem, where we focus on intellectual climate, student success, and lifelong learning.” 

Having a clear vision for how ACUE would fit into Winston-Salem State’s institutional strategies is what has made our partnership so beautiful. We worked closely with the Center for Innovative and Transformative Instruction, which moved quickly and intentionally to recruit faculty for its inaugural cohorts.

The ACUE course, a comprehensive 25-module program, would require faculty to devote a significant amount of time on a weekly basis for the entire academic year. Once again, the  Center for Innovative and Transformative Instruction, or CITI, was critical to supporting faculty and keeping them engaged throughout the entirety of the program. It was an honor to work with Dr. Wanda White, the center’s director, and Dr. Jeremiah Schipp, an ACUE co-facilitator who also created a Class of 2022 Yearbook that does an excellent job of telling the ACUE story at Winston-Salem State University. 

Winston-Salem State University Class of 2022 ACUE Yearbook

“I really expected us to lose faculty over the course of the year, but you all challenged my deficit thinking,” Graham said. “We lost very few faculty throughout the year, which suggests to me that you are committed to our students, you are committed to your own learning opportunities, and you are committed to this university and what we stand for.”

“Faculty, thank you so very much for jumping in headfirst into this opportunity,” Graham continued. “You had faith in the size of a mustard seed, as they say, and you took that first step.”

To scale the ACUE Online Teaching Excellence program at WSSU, the CITI will work closely with certified faculty to serve as leaders for the university at large.

“We need you to be ambassadors within your departments and across the campus,” Graham said. “We must work in partnership to achieve the larger goal here, which is to ensure that student success and student engagement and learning at a very optimal level is occurring. That is the power of partnership.”

Dr. Barbara Rodriguez is the Regional Director for Academic Programs for ACUE. 

Watch the full ACUE Pinning Ceremony on the Center for Innovative and Transformative Instruction YouTube page. 

Hear from ACUE Certified Faculty at WSSU: 

• Dr. Cindy Bell, Occupational Therapist (12:55) 
• Dr. Fenghai Guo, Associate Professor, Chemistry (19:59)
• Ms. Michele Leverett, Instructor, University College