Abstract:

Despite e-learning or technology-enhanced learning is more and more introduced in traditional universities, there are already a number of issues regarding the difficulties that face-to-face teachers find when enhancing Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) in their teaching practices (Laurillard, 2002; Bates, 2003), specially related with the attitudes needed to successfully face this methodological change.

The Universidad Mayor de San Andrés (UMSA) is a university founded in 1832, settled in La Paz (Bolivia), and has got over 75,000 students. UMSA wants to foster a challenging change in its faculty, asking them for enhancing e-learning in their teaching methods taking advantage of its potential.

Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (UOC) is a 15 years-old fully online university that currently manages over 48,000 students and 2,800 university teachers. A specific teaching model has been developed by this university to match the opportunities e-learning is giving to Higher Education institutions.

Matching UMSA needs and UOC expertise, an online course on online teaching strategies has been designed and delivered to the UMSA faculty. The course is composed by three different modules, but this article concerns just the first one, called “Planning and developing strategies for online teaching”. Fifty-six participants have taken the course, coming from different centres and having different professional profiles.

The main aim of this survey is to analyze if the teaching attitudes of these faculty have shifted at the end of the course and in respect to the beginning of it. To do it, a combination of quantitative and qualitative methods has been applied. An online questionnaire has been delivered at the beginning of the course in order to know which their attitudes were before experiencing this process. The results have been faced with the ones from another questionnaire delivered at the end of the course. In addition, perceptions from interviews and informal meetings have been used to complete the survey.
This article reports on how the process has been developed and which the main changes have been.

Keywords:

E-Learning, technology enhanced learning, teacher training, Higher Education, institutional co-operation.