This study describes a teaching intervention carried out in the field of telecollaboration on a university-level course. Two main goals were set for this didactic innovation, which was carried out through an Interinstitutional Teaching Project: firstly, to increase the time of exposure to the foreign language (English/Spanish) and secondly, to raise cultural awareness among British and Spanish university students. The qualitative method has been applied in order to describe the participation and involvement of the learners. This case study firstly describes telecollaboration and the research that has recently been carried out in this field. Secondly, it presents the three phases of the project: action plan, development and evaluation. Thirdly, participants’ perceptions (both positive and negative) are described. Students’ comments are analyzed mainly in terms of linguistic, cultural or other general features expressed by participants. Finally, this case study includes a conclusion in which planning strategies and task design are emphasized, since both have brought about a successful experience for university students.

The article demonstrates the results of implementing the use of online learning contents found on the resource YouTube in the statistics course of graduate level. The objective was to verify whether the use of the educational YouTube channel tool promotes better results in students learning Mastery in Business Administration from the Tecnologico de Monterrey in the quarter of April to July 2016. The method consisted of sharing weekly videos with the students that farther exemplify the materials related to the subject matter for a more comprehensive understanding of these concepts. The research was conducted by descriptive and inferential statistics dividing students into a control or experimental group. After analysis, it was found that from second partial exam and on the group that had access and exposure to the shared videos on the educational channel on YouTube had better grades than those without such tool, so it is concluded that there is a benefit in academic achievement by using this resource for learning content.

This article is based on a research which sought to identify the technological appropriation of five teachers who excel using technologies, according to their institute’s directors, to incorporate open educational resources (OER) to support educative practices and propitiate the student’s meaningful learning; these OER are public domain resources used for teaching, learning and researching under some intellectual license that allows their use and re-purposing. The case study was the methodology and also electronic tests, observation sheets and triangulating of results were used. The results indicated that teachers have dissimilar knowledges and technological strengths –with some coincidence– using OER to support educative process, which showed to be useful as referents to integrate a proposal about using, selecting and producing OER with effectiveness which allow better educative practices and propitiate the meaningful learning.

The purpose of this study is to identify the perception of students in fifth and sixth grade public elementary schools on their competencies in the use of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) and investigate whether there are differences based on gender, have a computer and Internet access at home. A non-experimental quantitative methodology transactional was used and the sample was composed of 201 students from public elementary schools where 51.6% are fifth- and sixth 48.4% of which 52.6% were boys and 47.4% girls. The instruments used were two surveys Likert scale with five response options. The first survey measures the use of ICT in daily life and the second survey measures the use of ICT in school. The results show that students make moderate use of ICT and that there are no significant differences based on gender and have or not have a computer but do exist in access to the Internet. It is concluded that the students use ICT more for recreation than for school activities and their competencies in the matter are limited.

This paper relates the experience acquired with the usage of Moodle assisting the teaching –learning process in the Literature Appreciation Seminar 1 given to fifth semester students in the Spanish Major from the Benemérita y Centenaria Escuela Normal del Estado de San Luis Potosí. The purpose if this work is to reflect about the findings obtained based on a qualitative and quantitative analysis from the information gathered with the application of a semi-structured questionnaire. The results obtained reflect student’s weekly work, mostly to comply with assignment submissions. In a general view, it is noticed that pupils find themselves motivated working with this learning tool. It is also seen as an opportunity area, the reinforcement of this kind of learning focusing more on collaborative work and managing more options from the Moodle platform. Some of the conclusions from this paper are the importance of incorporating Learning Management Systems in pre-service training teaching from a didactic, constructive and ecological perspective, as well as, allowing students to work with ICT by creating significant learnings using virtual environments in order to be able to transfer them to other contexts.

Currently, Information and Communications Technologies (ICT) have become essential tools in academic practice; however, its use within the teaching-learning process has focused only on digitizing educational acquis, while educational practice still preserves traditional, methods, instead of using collaborative environments and other benefits offered by the field of Web 2.0. Thus, this research, which corresponds to a quantitative-descriptive correlational level, it has been done through survey methodology. Its aim is to analyze the ICT training of teachers and students in relation to digital competence and the use of ICT in Web 1.0 and 2.0 in academic practice, in reference to some contextual factors in Higher Education System in administrative sciences in the metropolitan area of the city of Queretaro. It was found that there is a relation between of digital competence and teaching training in ICT, as well as a direct relation of the use of ICT among teachers and students. This affects academic performance, showing that the innovative use of ICT has favorable effect on student academic practice.

One of the existing signs in the history of mankind in the electronic union of the planet, which manifests itself by the presence of ICT in all spheres of human endeavor, including education, this has generated new paradigms that demand technological updating, teacher training and analysis of the processes in educational institutions. Hence the importance of carrying out this research, from a case study, with the purpose to analyze, learning scenarios and satisfaction of virtual learning mode graduate students of the Autonomous University of Chihuahua in three periods: 2010, 2014 and 2015. Methods used were analytical-synthetic and theoretical-deductive. The techniques were bibliographic, survey, and structured interview. Results reflect a tendency to individual work and the need to incorporate a more creative aspect in the tasks that teachers ask for, also, it reveals the need of more interaction between involved actors in the process, more teachers’ commitment in tutorial work and in digital alphabetization, as well as the need to stimulate collaborative work and connective learning between students. All this to attain more quality in virtual education.

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The social service is an essential part of modernization process of national and international Higher Education institutions, because it is an academic activity for the benefit of society and where university students consolidate their vocational training. The Social Service for distance Higher Education is a challenge, mainly because they should design innovative strategies to provide the conditions to link and coordinate academic work among the four most important actors in any model education: Students, teachers, labor context, and plans and study programs. Based on the above and considering that students in educational programs online of the UAT are distributed throughout Mexico and the United States, the Intervention Project is presented as a viable, creative and systematic option for distance students do their social service. Throughout this work it presents the structure, the work methodology, lines of action and generation of knowledge for the development of Intervention Project, as well as the delivery process reports of Social Service for distance students can fulfill in a timely manner with this institutional and social commitment.

Nowadays immersive virtual reality systems have a growing relevance in educational environments as tools to encourage learning through two important keys concepts: Immersion and interaction. This paper describes the use of virtual reality systems in education, taking as a case study an immersive 3D virtual reality system with NUI developed for the purpose of facilitating the inspection of wind turbines for didactic purposes. The proposed system searches technological convergence of visualization devices, data acquisition tools and graphics software. To achieve this system a software development methodology of Pressman was followed. The qualitative results of a first evaluation at the system indicate that the proposal allows an immersive virtual reality experience offering a great similarity to the real environment, with the ability to interact through gestures and body movements. This helps to motivate learning and stimulate interest in practicing with this technology by users. Moreover, achieved technological convergence between visualization devices, interaction tools and graphics software, allows us to make a step forward in the development of this type of teaching tools.

The following text presents an analysis of communication and collaboration as two central aspects in the design of virtual learning environments, noticing that in many offered courses the design does not necessarily focus on creating learning communities, but to develop a series of learning activities that basically maintain a control scheme by teaching through moderation and instructions, which leaves little margin for autonomy and self-management among students. To this end, has been analyzed the MOOC Information and Communication Technologies in Education in the Coursera platform. The working methodology was based on the review of the main concepts (communication and collaboration) discussed in relation to the AVA, the main topics of discussion forums, management students in learning communities, participation in various communication channels, results of course approval. These results demonstrated that communication and collaboration is possible in MOOCs, and how autonomy and motivation is substantial for collaborative efforts among hundreds of participants. The study confirmed that collaborative products can be made voluntarily, if participants have a common language and similar incentives.

The study describes the advantages of using a virtual tool designed to validate the content of research instruments, through the technique of expert judgment. This study presents the results of a survey applied to experts who participated as judges in the content validation, exposing their opinion and experiences in the validation of instruments. The ethodological design included three phases: the first, related to the design of the virtual tool; subsequently, the application of this tool through a real exercise and with the purpose of validating a questionnaire; for the last phase the results of the seven judges participants were analyzed. The findings show that the use of the virtual tool facilitates the organization of the information in items by dimension, and the registration of the opinion of the judges by the categories of clarity, coherence, relevance and sufficiency.

Pedagogical innovation mediated by educational technology in the digital world is one of the contemporary challenges in higher education. Therefore, the aim is to present a reflexion about the contribution and didactic organization of Open Educational Resources (OER) and Massive Open Online Courses (MOOC). Parameterized by procedures of the case study, we analyze the data from two international MOOC that focused on the theme OER. As a result of active participation in the courses, we registered the course plans, teaching materials, assessment methodology, learning activities and the interaction between participants and sharing online. It revealed a diversified didactic elements in MOOC with an emphasis on video and variation between working hours, type and number of weekly activities. Although OER and MOOC already are concrete possibilities for online university education in the digital world, with great demand, it is necessary to invest in institutional policies to consolidate the open education.

In order for an online course to be properly carried out it must be properly planned. The goal of this paper is to provide users with a methodology to design, assess and follow up a good quality online course project. The methodology proposes six phases to be followed in order to accomplish the task: Analysis of educational problem; justification and purposes of the project; proposal of project’s perspectives; education, operational and financial planning; project’s expected results, and project tracking and assessment. The proposed methodology allowed designing and carrying out the online course project called Rubrics for Assessment of Activities of e-Learning which was given at the Distance University of Poland. Even though the course was highly assessed by its participants, their comments imply the necessity of a more careful planning of the pedagogical components of the course. Despite this weakness, the project allowed to obtain answers to the main questions raised by decisions to be made when planning a course: What is intended to be done?, why?, what for?, how?, when?, by whom?, with what resources and funds? It is concluded that the proposed methodology may constitute a reference framework for the universities that wish to plan a high quality online course, both in Poland and in other countries.

This work aims is to introduce the e-Literary Circle (e-LC) as an academic innovation that parts from the conventional Literary Circle (CL) towards, its adaptation to an accesible computer platform, and the transformation of an oral practice in English into a written production process. The methodology selected is based on the social interaction approach where 38 university students participated in a distance educational intervention designed by the researcher team. From the qualitative method were applied the technics: Focus group, contextualized observation, and semi-structured interview to test the efficiency of the digital tool. The results demonstrate a high technical feasibility of the e-LC and its contribution for the participants improve their written production levels in the English language, despite being in adverse conditions. It is concluded that digital education enhances the possibilities of resuming the daily march of educational activities with quality, within scenarios affected by natural disasters. In addition, the use of the Literary e-Circle has managed to reduce student’s exposure to latent hazards in natural catastrophes events, such as the 7.8-magnitude earthquake that hit Ecuador on April 16, 2016.

The aim in this paper is to present the preliminary results of a qualitative, multiple case study whose objective was to analyze the way educational practices (EP) are carried out by virtual faculty, when they incorporate Open Educational Resources (OER), as well as the way in which this appropriation of OER contributes to the pedagogical transformation of these practices in the field of education at a master’s level. The research involved three faculty of a Mexican university. The data analysis was performed; first, by reviewing each case, initially coding and categorizing in base to the established theoretical references and then tuning as the data emerged. Subsequently, the categorical sum of the cases was made as a whole to obtain global results. The results indicate that the EP of the participants developed predominantly with technological appropriation at the reorientation level, using mostly open access scientific articles to carry out activities with a teaching approach of deepening into knowledge. Teachers using OER recognize changes in their EP such as the enrichment in course design, pedagogical flexibility, variety of resources, personalization of teaching, development of student-centered approaches, and support in the development of competencies. This paper tries to contribute to the knowledge about the implementation of EP when OER were included and carried out in a Mexican context, as well as its potential impact on these educational practices.

The objective of this work is to analyze the implementation ofcontent curation experiences in educational practice. The point of departure is the premise that this activity is not reduced to the information management, but that it affects the capacity of individuals to perform optimally in the environment of modern digital media. The methodology applied is the systematic literatura review. Through a search limited to the period 2011-2016, 19 empirical studies were found. The objectives, technological tools and main results of these studies were identified. The level of analysis of the following three aspects was evaluated: Collaborative learning, information management and training for digital media. The latter was less relevant. The conceptual discussion was integrated with the evidence of the experiences reviewed as a reference framework of the educational possibilities of content curation. The review shows great educational potential of content curation and encourages continued exploration from different contexts.

This article presents a descriptive study whose objective was to identify the possibilities of the social network Facebook in the field of teaching. For this purpose, a closed reagent survey was designed and applied to a sample of 142 higher education teachers. We also worked on an open question from which we generated categories of analysis that complemented the quantitative results represented by frequencies in percentages. Some of the most significant findings refer the high frequency of use of Facebook (daily), and the mastery between medium and high that has the majority of teachers (90.92%) in the use of this social network. We find a great variety of uses of Facebook, in the teaching process and in the rest of the activities of teachers, which may be of special interest to those teachers who want to implement this social network to their practice. We identified some negative factors such as lack of structure and excessive visual noise. We conclude that, with a proper direction and design, Facebook can promote dynamic and attractive learning environments for higher education students.

The present qualitative study aimed to understand teacher’s beliefs about the benefits of the use of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) by the families of the students, and of the educational practices to encourage the use of ICT by parents. Interviews were conducted with 12 teachers from urban public elementary schools, eight women and four men, aged between 23 and 55 years. The information was analyzed with the inductive method. It was found that teachers consider that ICT use by families improves support for home learning, cultural capital of students, and communication with parents. Teachers believe that they encourage families to use ICT when they handle it to inform them about homework and school activities. It was concluded that the teachers consider that the management of ICT by the families favors the teaching process. However, their beliefs about practices that promote their use by families are limited. These findings suggest that while teachers are aware of the benefits of ICT, it is necessary to train them to favor a wider use of technologies by families.