HIGHER EDUCATION TEACHER´S ASSESSMENT OF AN E-LEARNING BASED TRAINING PROGRAM IN MEXICO

Public Higher Education Institutions in México have been trying to implement different approaches of e-learning as a way to deal with their main challenges (shrinking budgets, lack of universal access and a weak connection with the productive sector among others).
The results of these efforts have been studied over the last years by an important number of researchers, however, most of this assessments have been focused either in comparing the use of information and communication technologies (ICT) against a traditional course or to analyze the attitudes towards the ICT in samples composed by students of the Universities.
Last year the General Direction of Technological Education (DGEST in Spanish) invited some of the teachers working in Public Technological Institutes to an on line training program.
The objective of this paper is to assess the teachers response to e-learning training, in order to achieve this goal a questionnaire was given to a sample of 50 teachers after finishing the course, most of the results were measured in a likert scale and analyzed with a chi square test. The obtained results show that participants were more willing to work in groups and cooperate, that the average amount of time dedicated to study the contents of the course was bigger than in traditional education, than the students found the course to be coherent and well organized and an overall opinion of the necessity to adapt the ICT in their courses. Nonetheless, results also show that they get tired sooner, that they consider the feedback and evaluation to be inadequate and that they´re not adopting the skills they learned to improve their performance, this last statement is even more notorious with the teaching staff who has more than ten years in the position.