I have been fortunate to have several opportunities to work as a teacher, and thus develop an appreciation for some of the challenges, rewards, and ingredients of successful teaching. Through these experiences, I have discovered how enriching the teaching profession is; as a result of the interaction with students from different backgrounds and cultures.

As a student, I always admired the professors that have well-organized courses, present relevant concepts with clarity, ask for interesting and challenging assignments or projects, and give the opportunity for one-on-one guidance or personal advisement; I admire even more the ones that always kept the students engaged and excited.  As a teacher, I have tried to add all these elements in my classes and I am always looking for ways of showing to the students that learning Computer Engineering, Computer Science, and Information Technology is interesting, relevant, and fun.

For my courses, I always have a website where I state clearly important elements of the course: the objectives and goals; the grading policy; a detailed schedule for the whole semester with the content of each class, exam dates, labs/assignments due dates; news and messages about the class; and links to other resources, tutorials,
videos, and supplemental material. From the first day of classes, I make sure that the students know how to find the site, and more important, how to make good use of it. For example, when teaching logic and problem solving and programming, I make sure that they know all the external resources I found for them, videos, paper, articles, etc. In addition, I consider it really important to have a system to keep the students informed about their progress and give them timely feedback about their assignments and exams which I think is a challenge when you have many students. Using technology helps to achieve this; progress information and current grade helps the students to make decisions about the time or effort they should put to reach their personal goals; which is translated into students’ retention.