Prof. Patricia Brazil Arinto has been elected as the new University of the Philippines (UP) Faculty Regent (FR) starting January 2017 to December 2018, to succeed Regent Philip Ian Prieto Padilla, MD, PhD. Her plans of action include specific proposals for faculty development and welfare, inter-campus faculty collaboration and proactive faculty participation in University governance.
Prof. Arinto has been with UP for 27 years. She served as the Dean of the UP Open University (UPOU) Faculty of Education (FEd) but her second term was cut short seven months to completion when she resigned from her post following her FR nomination. She has also held other administrative positions both at the UPOU and in UP. Some of the most recent committee appointments at the UP System level included being the Chair of the UP General Education Task Force for 2015-2016, and the UP System GE Council 2011-2013 and 2016-2019.
At the UPOU, her initiatives include the institution of an independent learning track for UPOU programs with small enrollments; the abolition of UPOU's instructional material fee as part of UPOU's adoption of open educational resource-based course packages; and the institution of the Master of Distance Education, Graduate Certificate in Distance Education and the Bachelor of Education Studies, among others.
She was recognized at the 2016 UP Knowledge Festival being one the UP's most highly cited academics and researchers based on Google Scholar. She is known as an expert in distance education, learning design, and teacher professional development in technology-supported learning, where she has published several book chapters and journal articles. Her research involvement and external work included being the Team Leader for the Technology-supported Teacher Professional Development in Early Literacy Instruction; Theme Adviser for Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) for the Digital Learning for Development (DL4D); Deputy Principal Investigator of Research on Open Educational Resources for Development (ROER4D) project of International Development Research Centre (IDRC); Project Leader and Principal Investigator of an Australian Government-funded study on the use of tablet computers in public secondary schools in the Philippines. Prof. Arinto holds a Doctor in Education degree from the Institute of Education, University of London and a Post-Graduate Certificate in Technology-Based Distributed Learning from the University of British Columbia (Canada). Both her master's and bachelor's degree are from UP. (Anna Cañas-Llamas)
