The tools are available, the challenge is to be able to use the tools to create competencies, a challenge that can be met with judicious application towards the achievement of competencies rather than the transmission of knowledge.
Information and communication technologies have impacted all types of businesses, industry and, in general, daily life. Education is not alien to these changes, helping you move from a physical environment to a virtual environment.
The main purpose of education is to create competencies in the student. This does not only apply in formal school education, through colleges or universities, but also in seminars, conferences and practically any event where the transmission of knowledge is an integral part of the process.
I am not a teacher by profession, a profession for which I have great respect for the impact and responsibility they have in the formation of future leaders. The course of my work has given me the opportunity to serve as a teacher in various subjects in various universities in Latin America, being able to validate that satisfaction that is felt when the student surpasses the teacher.
The first conferences or classes that I had the opportunity to dictate were supported on "acetates" that had to be burned in the photocopier, of printed papers. The colors were added one with indelible ink markers. It forced us to be very clear about what was going to be said since modifying these acetates required reworking them.
Today we have countless tools that allow us to meet the greatest challenge of generating skills in the student. These competences are divided into three important areas that the student must develop: knowing how to know, knowing how to do, and knowing how to be. The first time I read about this, I felt in psychology class, however the application of the concept of training by competencies allows us to guarantee that the effort made from the tutor's point of view and the tools that conform to this will have the desired effect on the student in one of the three areas or in several at the same time.
With the virtualization of education, we also have to meet the same training challenges for the student, but practically without the physical presence of the tutor. This virtualization can be divided into two different scenarios, depending on the presence of the tutor, if it is live (even through a videoconference, she would be there, at least to answer questions), or if she is not present live.
The above scenarios are neither better nor worse than one compared to the other. They are different and have advantages and disadvantages of their own. For both scenarios, there are computer platforms that allow the training process to be carried out. But it is up to the tutor to know how to exploit these technologies to fulfill the task discussed above. The construction of competences is not simple, therefore the courses must be structured, and the interventions of both the tutor and the students in such a way that the acquisition or not of these competencies can be evaluated, to make the pertinent adjustments and achieve the role.
The task is to be able to combine all the tools available then to build these competencies. Today the platforms for virtual education or electronic education, or e-learning, range from free ones such as Moodle and Dokeos, to those that are commercially distributed.
Today all of them support the possibility of making live conferences, delayed conferences, embedding voice and video in the different pages, managing forums, taking and automatically grading exams, assigning tasks, correcting them and commenting on their development.
The fact that the tools are there does not imply that the achievement of the objective is given only by the use of the tool. The "virtualization" puts an additional burden on the tutor to transmit and create skills without necessarily being able to "see" the performance and development of the student.
Simple techniques such as considering the forum as the classroom for example, allow you to structure discussion threads as if you were participating in a physical class. The tasks should be structured as a "laboratory" where the correct application of the concepts acquired can be measured in the result of the task. The evaluations should not be only as a measure of knowledge acquisition, such as taking the lesson about what has been read, but also asking about the application of what has been read to questions that require the use of two or more concepts together.
The tools are available, the challenge is to be able to use the tools to create competencies, a challenge that can be met with judicious application towards the achievement of competencies rather than the transmission of knowledge.
