GUIDELINE 3


EDUCATIONAL INNOVATION

a) RECOMMENDATIONS TO GOVERNMENTS

*  To create instruments to enhance educational innovation.

*  To promote intercultural education and produce statistics to measure the
participation of students, teachers, and researchers, especially indigenous and
afro-descent individuals in higher education.

*  To motivate professors by providing career plans and salary compensation levels,
promoting continuous training and appropriate conditions to achieve professional
performance.

*  To foster the use of ICTs throughout the education system and promote virtual
education with appropriate quality assurance mechanisms.

*  To create regulatory and support mechanisms to encourage entrepreneurial
vision and educational innovation.

*  To organize working groups comprised of Higher Education institutions experts
and government specialists in order to move forward in the process of educational
innovation.

*  To bring together teams of Higher Education institutions experts and government
specialists to consolidate the process of educational innovation.

b) RECOMMENDATIONS TO HEI

*  To develop new curricula, educational models, and academic strategies with
attention to the new contexts, comprehensive training and the relations between
professionals and the labor-market; to provide more choices for students within the
educational systems, with flexible curricula to facilitate their movement within the
structure, to promote new paths including inter-disciplinary, multi-disciplinary and
trans-disciplinary perspectives that allows an exchange with other national and
international institutions.

*  To broaden continued education offerings as a goal to generalize life-long
learning higher education.

*  To foster permanent capacity building for professors in new instruction/learning
models, providing skills to work in complex educational environments, with
heterogeneous groups, or individuals of diverse cultural and social backgrounds.

*  To assure interaction and commitment with other levels of instruction, contributing
to the quality of primary and secondary education and to the eradication of
illiteracy, by enhancing training at all levels of education, including formal and
informal sectors, technical degrees and programs compatible with employment.

*  To foster the use of ICTs in higher education, to increase offerings of distance
education, creating support centers and innovative models such as joint programs,
modular courses and certification by modules among others in order to modernize
academic practices, increase coverage of HE, diversify offerings and democratize
access to knowledge.

*  To establish and support lines of research aimed at attempting educational
innovations at different moments of the educational process, from curriculum
design to academic experiences in the fields of learning and instruction and
“learning to learn” programs.

*  To strengthen social and humanities studies, which are the crosscutting keys
areas to best prepare students in all university courses.