Competencia digital del profesorado universitario ante la COVID-19, en Paraguay

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to analyze the competences of university professors in the use of technological resources in the interaction with the students in the context of COVID-19, digital competence, emotional condition, accessibility and obstacles inthe use of resources, referred to the empowerment of technological tools as a means to develop pedagogical interventions. Digital competence is a pending subject in teacher training, which with the COVID-19 pandemic forces university teachers to mutate towards a techno-digital profile, in which they integrate their skills with digital ones. The reality is given by the need that digital skills are essential for teaching to give continuity to educational activity. The applied method was descriptive, cross-sectional. For the selection of the participants, the non-probabilistic “snowball” sampling was applied, with which a total sample of 910 professors, belonging to ten Paraguayan universities. The reliability of the instrument for closed questions was obtained from the analysis of Cohen's Kappa index, a value of ,922, considered almost perfect, and for scale-type questions, Cronbach's alpha statistic, (,975). The validity applied the factorial analysis procedure from structural equations. Descriptive statistics, non-parametric test, Kolgomorov-Smirnov goodness of fit test, chi-square and Spearman's correlation were used in the analysis of the results, using the SPSS v.25 program. The most important results indicate greater digital skills during continuous training, positive emotional condition towards technology, WhatsApp, email and Google Classroon are the most used tools, the obstacles it ́s the connectivity, evaluation of online learning, training teacher, availability of technological tools, low "expert" level in teaching digital competence. In the discussion, the need for teacher training from programs to strengthen university teacher skills in the purchase of digital skills was highlighted.