Abstract:

Technology is a tool that has changed the way we interact and share information, breaking the geographical barriers and bringing the world closer to us. Education is an area where technology intends to build a bridge and a meeting point for teachers and students to interact and access to resources related to the subjects they’re interested in. The Ministry of National Education (MNE) of Colombia, aware of the role of the technology in education, created in 2004 the Portal Colombia Aprende, a platform designed as a virtual space for the educational community. Since then, the Portal has focused on fostering the use of digital resources by teachers and students, in order to enhance learning-teaching processes in different regions across the country.

Despite the Portal counts with a large repository of resources, the access and use of the information available on the platform is scarce. This issue has motivated different actors to propose initiatives to foster the pedagogical use of Digital Educational Resources (DER) in educational environments. In this way, the MNE and the National University of Colombia are implementing a Virtual Pedagogical Assistance Program, whose purpose is to give an initial approach to the educational community (mainly teachers) to the resources available at the Portal, as well as to provide a continuous support for their use within the classroom.

One of the activities of the program consists on knowing the teachers’ perceptions regarding the usage of Portal DERs. Teachers’ perceptions could be a source of information to lead the actions and strategies of the pedagogical assistance for the use of DER.

To identify teachers’ perceptions about the use of the DER available at the Portal Colombia Aprende, a survey based on the Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology (UTAUT) was proposed. This theory defines some categories as determinant factors in the acceptance and use of new technologies, considering elements from sociology, psychology and information systems. The categories of the UTAUT model considered to design the instrument proposed in the present study were: performance and effort expectancy, social influence, facilitating conditions, self-efficacy, anxiety and behavioral intention. The original items associated to these categories were adapted to the research context and translated into Spanish. As a result of the design and validation process, a self-report instrument with 30 items (evaluated through a Likert Scale) was consolidated to identify the teachers’ perceptions about the use of Portal DERs.

The instrument was applied to participant teachers of the Virtual Pedagogical Assistance Program at the beginning of the intervention process. Participant teachers belong to public schools along the country and are associated to different areas and grades. The results show that teachers have an overall positive perception towards the use of DER. Perform and effort expectancy, social influence and behavioral intention to use DER were the better rated categories, while items related to self-efficacy, anxiety and facilitating conditions reflected a negative perception of teachers on these categories. These last results are a valuable element to address different actions focused on socialize the DER available for the educational community, and foster its autonomous use.