Training Plan for the Continuity of Non-Presential Education in Six Peruvian Universities during COVID-19

Abstract

This article shows the response offered by the UTEC-UNED-TECSUP Consortium to six Peruvian public (national) universities aimed at strengthening the digital competences of their communities, made up of managers, teachers, students, and support technicians. The contextual and situational diagnosis, which covered organizational, technological, and competence dimensions, revealed a series of cross-cutting needs related to technological skills that prevented the training or mobilization of the digital competences necessary for progress in the other dimensions under study. The response was an online training plan, consisting of three training programs and eighty-three courses. The pedagogical strategy was based on the scaling of competence achievements that ended with problem-solving and applications in daily activities. The accompaniment was carried out through virtual tutorials, distributed via synchronous and asynchronous sessions. In total, 5034 were involved—347 were teachers and managers, 4932 were students, and 25 were technical staff. The pedagogical and socio-emotional limitations of the university community, as well as the scarcity of technological resources and poor connectivity, meant that the plan was only partially implemented. Moreover, the short and intense period of development to which the universities were subjected was also a factor.

Challenges and Opportunities for Education Systems with the Current Movement toward Digitalization at the Time of COVID-19

“…The men-tal health concerns and related stresses resulted either from the fear of contagion, fear of unemployment or loss of salary (or for the students, delay in receiving scholarship funding), and other kinds of short-term financial crises inside the organization [26,70,88]. The second concern was the decline in student enrollment and the increase in student attrition [6,9,35,89]. The overall result of the study urges planning for the appropriate transformation of educational centers to guarantee the financial survival of the university within the current crisis, plus the promise of useful course planning and management of the educational programs for the mutual benefit of the students, faculty members, other employees and society [2,12,[94][95][96].…”

“…Hence, many of the educational classes, short courses, businesses and industrial practices have been delivered online since the Spring semester of 2019-2020 [15,20,[22][23][24][25][26][30][31][32][33][34]. However, there are great concerns over a loss of interest of the students and learners in in-person participation during coming semesters [6,9,35,89], which will cause substantial financial concerns for the presidents and chancellors of universities [26,70,88]. With the emergence of the new practice of online classes, the business model of revenue generation in the universities has evolved toward providing more technology-based solutions to the learners and students as the customers of their services [6,9,28,35,57,59,[88][89][90].…”

“…However, there are great concerns over a loss of interest of the students and learners in in-person participation during coming semesters [6,9,35,89], which will cause substantial financial concerns for the presidents and chancellors of universities [26,70,88]. With the emergence of the new practice of online classes, the business model of revenue generation in the universities has evolved toward providing more technology-based solutions to the learners and students as the customers of their services [6,9,28,35,57,59,[88][89][90]. In the new business model, the educational centers would need to invest in the new logic of attracting customers (i.e., the learners) interested in paying, while the governmental relief plans for the crisis period seem uncertain [23,27,58] (The interested reader is referred to [97][98][99] for further reading on the dominant logic of businesses.)…”

“…The cost of the IT-based educational program updates in universities may be recovered by the possibility of a higher number of participants accessing the required digital skills courses [6,9,35,59,89,90], according to the economy of scale. Additionally, the savings made by reductions in the costs of building maintenance, parking lots, etc.…”

“…However, the administration and faculty members also are part of the society impacted by the risk of contagion and not separated from the core crisis. In the case of private universities, the risk of closure of the center and unemployment of staff will intensify the urgency for appropriate remedies [66,67,87,88] to maintain revenue generation [6,9,35,59,89,90].…”