TEACHING SKILLS AND COMPETENCIES FOR THE INCORPORATION OF INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY AND COMMUNICATION FOR MEDICAL TRAINING

Objective: To identify the competencies in the instructional design and skills in using information technologies and communication technologies (ICT) for teachers of the School of Medicine in the design and delivery of courses on-line in the area of health sciences.

Material and methods: We conducted an observational, analytical, prospective and cross study with a group of 59 professors of higher education in the School of Medicine of University of Yucatan, Mexico in 2006, who applied a diagnostic tool of knowledge and skills for teaching online courses consist of 57 questions with closed answers with a Likert scale (0 to 3), 30 related to the instructional design skills, and 27 to skills in the use of ICT. Variables such as the teaching area, sex, age, seniority, level of education, graduate training, training in teaching, university role and experience in online courses (such as student or teacher) were analyzed with SPSS software v. 9.0.

Results: We found that teachers have the skills to instructional design at an intermediate level (65.81 on a scale of 0 to 90) and a moderate level in the ability to use ICT (54.38 on a scale from 0 to 81). The function was significantly associated with academic competence in instructional design (X2= 14.13, df= 4, p= 0.007). Age was significantly associated with the ability to use ICT (X2= 23.64, df= 9, p= 0.005) found an inverse relationship between these variables.

Conclusions: Once the skills and abilities of the participants identified training needs in two areas: a) instructional design: models for teaching online education, design and development of assessment tools for learning in virtual environments; and b ) use of ICT: design and development of digital educational materials and resources (learning objects), management of electronic information (electronic journals, scientific databases, repositories, learning management systems), and management of communication tools for virtual collaborative work and teaching (e-mail, chat, discussion forums, wikis, blogs, audio and video download on demand, videoconferencing).