Teaching is the reason I became a professor. I have taught university-level classes independently since 2002, guided by the philosophy that learning should be a positive experience, and that the instructor’s role is to design and scaffold this experience to engage students fully. For this to happen, learning experiences must be inviting, stimulating, and inclusive. Given that my research centers on educational technology, I strive to use innovative methodologies and tools to achieve these goals. At my first institution (ESPOL), I pioneered several teaching innovations, including blended learning (2002), flipped classrooms (2015), and massive online courses (2015). At NYU, I created and redesigned courses based on gameful pedagogy (Games and Play in Education, 2019), deliberate practice for skill acquisition (Technical Studio: Digital Skills for Learning Designers, 2020), and low/no-code tools to teach learning analytics and AI principles to students without programming or data science backgrounds (Theories and Principles of Learning Analytics Applications, 2019; and Building Artificial Intelligence Applications for Education, 2024).
I have taught both undergraduate and graduate courses and have been involved in training other professors on the use of educational technology and research-based teaching methods. I have created and redesigned curricula across multiple courses at ESPOL and NYU. My student evaluations have consistently exceeded institutional averages, with an average score of 91.53 out of 100 at ESPOL (compared to a school average of 85.93 among roughly 120 professors) and an average of 4.67 out of 5 at NYU (compared to a departmental average of 4.50 among 23 professors). In 2012, I obtained the Best Professor award at ESPOL for teaching excellence based on these evaluations. At NYU, students frequently describe me as “well-organized,” “very patient and kind,” “respectful to all students,” and as someone who “makes learning enjoyable.”