A step towards innovation at Central University of Ecuador: Implementation of the virtual educational platform

Abstract

The Ecuadorian university has trained professionals, most courses and programs are carried out with habitual practices and there is a little innovation in the use of new tools that favor learning. At Universidad Central del Ecuador (UCE) there were about eighty programs and each one of them had an average of sixty subjects. The common aspect is focused on the transfer of knowledge, remaining pending in getting learnings based on more active and participatory didactics. In the search for innovating teaching to improve learning, the insertion of new information and communication technologies in the university student´s life has been proposed, considering the implementation of a Virtual Platform, whose main purpose is to support the teaching-learning process. The proposed implementation of the Platform is carried out with a permeable effect according to the levels of interest of teaching, which is considered as a complementary task to the teaching activities and it certainly does not replace the presence of the teacher. It is established that the teaching process management lies down on the faculty´s exclusiveness. The first step was the implementation with an Open Source platform type, where elements such as usability, popularity, support, programming code, adaptability and capitalization were considered. The e-portfolio, including all available activities and resources, which favor innovation in the teaching task was taken into account. The structure of the paper is organized as follows: Introduction where the theoretical foundations are described. Methodology based on the action research through which the application of this process is described. And the results of both the piloting and the final implementation phases where faculty and students, as part of the sample and the implemented classes with the resources and activities used were cuantified.