Developing Capabilities for Distance Learning: Academic Instruction Through the Undergraduate and Graduate Curriculum

Sagrado en Línea has been a unique project. The Distance Learning Institute (InED, ined.sagrado.edu) was created with the key role of designing and implementing the DE infrastructure at University of Sacred Heart (USH). In doing so, it developed a laboratory setting in which students could creatively pursue new ideas and collaborate in the project. In fact, students had the opportunity to develop various applications and information resources: a Newsletter (El Niusleter), the "Sacred Heart ScreenSaver," a personalized student Portal ("Mi Sagrado"), as well as assist in the development of Moodle’s Interactive Instructor Guide.

When initiated five years ago, hybrid distance education was not nearly as widespread a concept as it is now and the USH became one of the forerunners in Puerto Rico in its promotion. The Activity Director, Dr. Antonio Vantaggiato, presented articles he had developed on the USH model as well as other areas including artificial intelligence. The articles were presented to prestigious international forums such as: ED-MEDIA and eLearn (both from the Association for the Advancement of Computers in Education) in Montreal and San Antonio, the Web-based Education Conference and Online-Educa, in Barcelona, Spain.

The developed model ensured quality control in the creation process of Web-based courses through an institution-wide collaborative effort in which faculty played a key role. This allowed the Institute to produce 117 quality on-line courses in the five-year period of the Title V grant. Also, the Institute produced or sponsored policies, guidelines and manuals throughout the project, taking care in the documentation process.

The annual Web e-ducation Congresses (2002 through 2005) brought together educators and professionals from the public and private sectors at the postsecondary as well as high school levels to discuss and share their experiences and research in the field. The Institute recruited a renowned group of speakers and conference leaders as keynote speakers. The Congresses also gave faculty the opportunity to publish and present their work through papers which were distributed to participants and available on-line. Papers were presented annually with contributions from the United States, including Puerto Rico, Canada, Colombia, Brazil, Spain and Cuba.

Finally, the project has fostered other related initiatives or alliances, among them the following:

1. The Institute acquired membership in the prestigious New Media Consortium (www.nmc.org), a group of leading institutions and museums worldwide devoted to the advancement of learning and creativity through technology.
2. The project required collaboration with other Institutional units to prepare and submit a proposal to the National Science Foundation (NSF) on high-performance computing infrastructure. The activity director together with Institute staff and students worked on the design of clusters as part of the proposal, later approved by NSF.
3. A grant from the Hispanic Educational Telecommunications System (HETS) (www.hets.org), a consortium of Hispanic Serving Institutions sponsored by the Fund for Postsecondary Education) was used to lead a team of seven institutions in the United States, including Puerto Rico to develop guidelines, templates and models for Learning Objects.

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