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“To successfully face the change brought about by the pandemic, teachers need to acquire digital competence in an accelerated way.”
We are living in a grave health situation worldwide caused by the emergence of the sars-coV-2 virus. From one moment to the next, schools, businesses, restaurants, and government institutions have had to modify their traditional processes to incorporate the Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) that allow them to survive or continue to operate.
In education, 40% of private schools in Mexico will cease to operate due to the pandemic. Some parents consider distance education insufficient and prefer to unenroll their children. This dropout, coupled with the lack of financial resources for tuition payment, has led to schools’ closure. Overall, the most affected educational levels have been preschool and primary school (Sánchez, 2020).
“Digital competency is not just a skill but a set of skills that facilitate teamwork, self-directed learning, critical thinking, creativity, and communication.”
Other discouraging data is that, according to the Global Skills Index (2020) study done by Coursera, Mexico is one of the countries with the lowest mastery of technological skills, ranked 58th out of the 60 countries evaluated in this study. In the subcategories that comprise specialized skills, the report published the following general results for the country:
Mastery of technological skills in Mexico
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Computer networks 0%
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Databases 8%
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Human-computer interaction 20%
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Operating systems 0%
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Software engineering 25%
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Security engineering 3%
These results of the study show that Mexico lags dreadfully in technological skills.
In most public and private schools, teachers had acquired digital competency to cope with pandemic changes immediately. However, despite all the difficulties, this crisis presents an opportunity to transform and reinvent education (Benussi and Aenea, 2020).
What is digital competency, and how is it developed?
Today’s society calls for up-to-date and innovative education that includes new digital tools to facilitate and optimize teaching-learning processes. Technology has transformed diverse areas of our lives. In education, it has driven the development of methodologies and new learning models, and the creation and access to open educational resources and digital learning objects available to the entire academic community.
However, digital competency is not just a skill but a set of skills that facilitate teamwork, self-directed learning, critical thinking, creativity, and communication. It is necessary to ensure instrumental-didactic training for teachers and practical models that can be reproduced without great difficulty in the environments where they unfold and truly support them in their teaching work (Rodríguez, 2015).
To achieve the above, in Mexico, the National Institute of Educational Technologies and Teacher Training (INTEF, 2017) contributes to improving the acquisition of digital competence in teachers by promoting self-assessment and continuous updating of new teaching-learning and training experiences. Below, we share the analysis of the Common Framework for Digital Teacher Competency INTEF 2017.
Common Framework for Digital Teacher Competency INTEF 2017
Information and informational literacy
The teacher should identify, analyze, organize, store, and retrieve the relevant information that supports the student’s learning. Students should be evaluated critically and responsibly. We recommend consulting trusted websites such as electronic journals listed in open-access databases to find high-quality publications such as Google Scholar, SciELO, REDALYC, and the Institutional Repository of Tecnológico de Monterrey (RITEC). We can also find diverse open educational resources on other websites such as the Observatory of Educational Innovation of Tecnológico de Monterrey. This site includes various current and vanguard publications for education within the framework of educational innovation. The information provided is free and accessible to all educational stakeholders who wish to improve their practices and innovate.
Communication and elaboration
Teachers must possess a compelling mastery of communication in digital environments, share resources, and collaborate with others using digital tools. Teachers are adapting their face-to-face courses to a virtual environment through Learning Management Systems (LMS) that facilitate content management. Other tools are cloud resources like Google Drive, Dropbox, OneDrive, email, video calls, interactive chats on educational platforms, content creation tools that allow collaboration among users, blogs, forums, Wikipedias, and social networks.
From this perspective, teachers trying to maintain constant communication with their students have resorted to using and appropriating various synchronous and asynchronous communication tools. In this process, they have evaluated and selected the tool that best satisfies their communication needs.
Creating digital content
In this respect, teachers should have the ability to generate multimedia content and use mechanisms to protect intellectual property. Therefore, we recommend using Creative Commons Licences in educational resources created by the teacher. It promotes a culture of respect for intellectual property and the distribution of content over the web. This webinar explains how to do it.
While teachers are urgently and rapidly developing digital content for their students, there remains an unfamiliarity with Creative Commons Licenses, the value of which resides in protecting the authorship of the digital content created.
Security
Security is about the protection of personal data and the safe use of information. Teachers sho
uld be able to recognize and apply mechanisms to protect personal information and their students’. They ensure the protection of personal data by using a secure unique password, selecting communication tools that guarantee security and privacy, and the avoidance of placing access links to virtual meetings on public sites such as social networks. By not following these recommendations, one runs the risk that anyone can access and misuse confidential and reserved information without consent.
In this sense, it is essential to take precautions with the personal and sensitive information that we share or that the students provide to us.
Problem Resolution
This competency turns out to be one of the most important because teachers must have the ability to make decisions. It involves a process of needs assessment and the relevant selection of resources and means to solve conceptual and technical problems. For example, teachers must select digital tools that facilitate their learning objectives, design effective learning activities aligned with content, and select evaluation mechanisms appropriate to the students’ characteristics.
A faculty with digital competency will generate diverse interactions with their students in digital environments and promote meaningful and enriched learning. We invite you to explore new digital tools, stay current using ICTs, reflect on where the teaching profession is headed, and develop skills to perform this work successfully.
About the Authors
Luisa Rosa Isela Aguilar Vargas (laguilar19@udavinci.edu.mx) holds a Bachelor’s in Education, is a master’s degree student in Educational Technology at Da Vinci University and is a professor on the Faculty of Education at the Autonomous University of Yucatan.
Emma Omolade Otuyemi Rondero (eotuyemi19@udavinci.edu.mx) holds a Bachelor’s in Gastronomy, is a master’s degree student in Educational Technology at Da Vinci University and is currently a private lecturer on Languages and Gastronomy.
References
Benussi, L. & Enea, M. (2020). Education Disrupted, Education Reimagined: Thoughts and Responses from Education’s Frontline During the COVID-19 Pandemic and Beyond. July 22, 2020, from the Wise Qatar Foundation Accessed at: https://www.wise-qatar.org/the-elephant-in-the-room/
Rodríguez, I. (2015). La importancia de las competencias digitales de los docentes, en la sociedad del conocimiento. Revista Iberoamericana de Producción Académica y Gestión Educativa, 2, pp.1,2,7. Accessed at: https://www.pag.org.mx/index.php/PAG/article/view/484
Instituto Nacional de Tecnologías Educativas y Formación del Profesorado. Competencia Digital Educativa. Accessed at: https://intef.es/formacion-y-colaboracion/competencia-digital-educativa/
Coursera (2020). Global Skills Index. Accessed at: https://pages.coursera-for-business.org/rs/748-MIV-116/images/gsi2020_final.pdf
Sánchez, A. (2020). Advierten que 4 de cada 10 escuelas privadas cerrarán por educación a distancia. Accessed at: https://www.elfinanciero.com.mx/empresas/advierten-que-4-de-cada-10-de-escuelas-privadas-cerraran-por-educacion-a-distancia
Editing by Rubí Román (rubi.roman@tec.mx) – Observatory of Educational Innovation.
Translation by Daniel Wetta.
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This article from Observatory of the Institute for the Future of Education may be shared under the terms of the license CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 
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