Abstract:

Currently facing the demands of global development, the vertiginous advance of the Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) and their integration to Higher Education, international organisms identify distance learning as a basic strategy to solve issues of access, quality and equality in education. Therefore fortifying social, economic and cultural development in a global context.

This situation demands for institutions of Higher Education to reframe their educative systems, with the purpose of considering the opportunities that the incorporation of ICT would mean for their educational processes.

However, letting go of traditional educational schemes and creating new institutions of Higher Education is not the answer to those demands. Therefore when the educational programs, traditionally delivered in a face-to-face modality, move toward distance learning supported by ICT, they become an opportunity for improving, their quality and pertinence.

Due to the above, identifying the fundamental processes for a successful transition between educative modalities in Higher Education institutions becomes necessary. In this sense, exploring and diagnosing their potentialities and insufficiencies for ICT incorporation will facilitate the processes of transition from the face to face education toward the distance education supported by ICT.

The objective of this paper is to present the research methodology applied to obtain the exploration and diagnosis of potentialities and insufficiencies of the ICT incorporation process in an educational graduate program, with a face-to-face modality transitioning to a distance education supported by ICT.

This document is integrated by three sections:
1) An introduction presenting general information and contextualizing the importance of the educative face to face transition to distance education supported by ICT in Higher Education,
2) The fundamentals of the research methodologies applied to sustain the need of exploration and diagnosis of the potentialities and insufficiencies of educational programs in transition for the ICT incorporation,
3) The results of the case study of the Autonomous University of Baja California (UABC) in Mexico.

Keywords:

Transition processes, ICT, educative modalities, distance education supported by ICT.