Abstract:

Ibero CdMx announced the campus’ total closure for March the 23rd due to COVID-19 lockdown. DEAMeT’s team was already aware of what was happening in other universities worldwide, thereby started planning a strategy to face what was unavoidable: the shift to digital distance education at an institutional level. We implemented face-to-face courses about the LMS, personalized consultancies and webinars: we served 640 teachers, during 45 hours in 3 days. We widened the technical support service, designed a “Contingency kit”, an online (OL) teacher’s virtual community, acquired Zoom licenses, opened our Youtube channel and designed a series of webinars about digital distance education (DDE). From March to July 2020, we taught 22 different webinars during 661 hours to 6740 attendants (1959 unique teachers). At the first stage of our strategy, the shift to a remote emergency teaching (RET), 7 out of the 22 webinars were the “basic” ones, all related to DDE didactics and pedagogy, while the other 15 were about digital apps and the LMS. To be able to make the shift from the RET to a more sustained online distance education practice for the Autumn period, we designed a second stage of training and support. Nevertheless, at an institutional level, in May 2020 it was decided that the pedagogical training for OL environments was to be held by the Training Service Office (TSO) and limited the technological training and support to DEAMeT. During our webinars, we detected the main teachers’ needs around pedagogical issues in OL learning, which were transferred to the TSO, and technological issues that were attended on the progress by DEAMeT. The impact of DEAMeT’s strategy was made visible through the results of an institutional survey applied at the end of Autumn-winter period: 58% of the total teachers answered. 55% attended DEAMeT’s webinars and 51% recognized that they were the most significant support for their practice during the lockdown, putting our strategy at the top at an institutional level. From Spring to Autumn, the attendance to our webinars raised from 45% to 55%, despite the parallel TSO’s strategy to only offer information about DE, meaning that there was not a formal training for teachers on those topics. Teachers still struggle with the didactical planning of distance courses, the design of online activities and assessment, besides their difficulty to motivate and get students concentrate during the “distance zoom-courses”. It is evident that the TSO’s informational strategy had a low impact on teachers. This comparison leads us to conclusions that Digital Distance Education needs a Digital Distance Education theoretical framework, that the technological training cannot be reduced to its instrumental use and that teachers need to be supported and guided by people with expertise on the field of digital distance education. Almost all the results support the idea that formal training is important for faculty to integrate technology into their practice in a pedagogical way.

Keywords:

Teacher's formal training, COVID-19, Digital Distance Education.