Revista Iberoamericana de la Educación, Vol - 7 No. 2, April - June 202 3

e-ISSN: 2737-632x

Pgs 67-78

* Master in Technology in

Education; University of Guayaquil;

ginger.navarreteme@ug.edu.ec;

https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4406-

8237

Specialist in General Surgery;

Universidad Católica Santiago de

Guayaquil;

angel.moreno02@cu.ucsg.edu.ec;

https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2222-

4289

Specialist in Dermatology;

University of Guayaquil;

maria.verag@ug.edu.ec;

https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6360-

4421

Master's Degree in Educational

Technology; Universidad de

Guayaquil,

byron.navarretem@ug.edu.ec

https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6026-

9955

Received: May, 2022

Approved: December, 2022

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.31876/ri

e.v6i4.239

http://www.revista-

iberoamericana.org/index.

php/es

How to cite:

Navarrete, G., Moreno, A.,

Vera, M., Navarrete, B. (2023)

Digital contents within virtual

classrooms. An analysis in

Ecuadorian education. Revista

Iberoamericana de la

Educación, 7(2)

Digital contents in virtual classrooms. An

analysis in Ecuadorian education

Los contenidos digitales dentro de las aulas virtuales. Un análisis en la

educación ecuatoriana

Conteúdo digital em salas de aula virtuais. Uma análise na educação

equatoriana

Ginger Navarrete Mendieta*

Angel Luis Moreno Briones**

María Elena Vera Gordillo***

Byron Francisco Navarrete Mendieta****

Abstract

With the health crisis that humanity went through with the

appearance of Covid-19, many countries are facing a great challenge,

which is to be able to achieve the continuation of studies while

complying with the social distancing and maintaining the same

quality in education. In this sense, technological tools are shown as a

means that helps and supports through its various educational

programs the teaching-learning processes. The new era of technology

forces education to change from its foundations in order to achieve

in students an integral formation and as part of it, the ability to learn.

The research developed for this proposal was of an exploratory

qualitative type, sources were collected from different research

works, web pages, articles in which the problem that many teachers

have when developing new and practical educational resources was

described. This research shows that the use of digital tools in the

development of educational resources favors education, making

classes more practical, interactive and dynamic.

Key words:

: Digital resources, digital platform, communicative

contents, digital competences.

Resumen

Con la crisis sanitaria que atravesó la humanidad con la aparición del

Covid-19, muchos países se enfrentan a un gran reto que es poder

lograr la continuación de los estudios cumpliendo con el

distanciamiento social y manteniendo la misma calidad en la

educación. En este sentido, las herramientas tecnológicas se

muestran como un medio que ayuda y apoya a través de sus diversos

Revista Iberoamericana de la Educación, Vol - 7 No. 2, April . June 2023

Digital contents in virtual classrooms. An analysis in Ecuadorian education

programas educativos los procesos de enseñanza – aprendizaje. La

nueva era de la tecnología obliga a la educación a cambiar desde sus

bases para conseguir en los estudiantes una formación integral y

como parte de ella, la habilidad de aprender. La investigación que se

desarrolló para esta propuesta fue de tipo cualitativo exploratorio, se

recopilaron fuentes de diferentes trabajos investigativos, páginas

web, artículos en la cual describe el problema que tienen muchos

docentes al momento de desarrollar recursos educativos novedosos y

prácticos. Esta investigación demuestra que el uso de las

herramientas digitales en el desarrollo de recursos educativos

favorece en la educación logrando que las clases sean más prácticas,

interactivas y dinámicas.

Palabras clave

Recursos digitales, plataforma digital, contenidos

comunicativos, competencias digitales.

Abstrato

Com a crise de saúde que a humanidade atravessou com o

aparecimento do Covid-19, muitos países estão a enfrentar um grande

desafio, que é o de serem capazes de conseguir a continuação dos

estudos, respeitando o distanciamento social e mantendo a mesma

qualidade na educação. Neste sentido, as ferramentas tecnológicas

são mostradas como um meio que ajuda e apoia através dos seus

vários programas educativos os processos de ensino-aprendizagem.

A nova era da tecnologia força a educação a mudar dos seus

fundamentos, a fim de proporcionar aos estudantes uma educação

integral e, como parte disso, a capacidade de aprender. A

investigação que foi desenvolvida para esta proposta foi de tipo

exploratório qualitativo, foram compiladas fontes a partir de

diferentes trabalhos de investigação, páginas web, artigos nos quais

é descrito o problema que muitos professores têm quando

desenvolvem recursos educativos novos e práticos. Esta pesquisa

mostra que a utilização de ferramentas digitais no desenvolvimento

de recursos educativos favorece a educação, tornando as aulas mais

práticas, interactivas e dinâmicas.

Palavras-chave: :

Recursos digitais, plataforma digital, conteúdo

comunicativo, competências digitais.

INTRODUCTION

Many technological changes have taken place in recent years, but

since 2020, with the global Covid-19 pandemic situation, changes

were accelerated, especially in education, and in view of this socio-

Revista Iberoamericana de la Educación, Vol - 7 No. 2, April . June 2023

Digital contents in virtual classrooms. An analysis in Ecuadorian education

sanitary condition, the vast majority of the population was forced to

stay at home to control the spread of the virus.

As a compensatory measure in the educational field, technology was

the means used to provide continuity to the educational processes at

all levels; on March 11, 2020, the WHO (World Health

Organization) declared COVID-19 through Ministerial Agreement

No. 00126-2020, declared the Ecuadorian state in a national health

emergency and designed strategies to prevent community

transmission.

One of the strategies that were implemented was that the Ministry of

Education of Ecuador issued a Ministerial Agreement No.

MINEDUC-MINEDUC-2020-00013-A, which provided for the

mandatory suspension of classes in person throughout the

Ecuadorian territory. The provision applied to public, state and

private educational institutions, as well as comprehensive

development centers for early childhood, in all shifts and modalities.

Likewise, the SENESCYT (Secretariat of Higher Education,

Science, Technology and Innovation), which regulates higher

education in public and private institutions, suspended academic

activities at national level; therefore, not only at primary and

secondary level but also at higher education level and with the

purpose of providing continuity to the education service, educational

platforms were implemented with all the curricular planning and

pedagogical resources, corresponding to all subjects and levels, so

that students may continue their studies.

This mediatic change is the one that Mariana Maggio (2021) in her

book Educación en Pandemia, refers about that:

Every student in basic or higher education needs a device connected

to the Internet to be able to fully access learning and, also,

experiences and forms of participation and cultural goods are created

and/or made available in virtuality, digital inclusion has been a right

since the mid-2000s and is a topic on the agenda of public policies

in the field of education (p. 38).

However, not all students and teachers were prepared to assume the

change from a face-to-face environment to an online environment,

so the need for training in digital competencies was felt more

strongly than ever. This juncture has been conducive to:

• Promote the training and development of teachers' digital

competencies.

• Recognize the great inequalities in the population (of student

teachers) in access to technology.

Revista Iberoamericana de la Educación, Vol - 7 No. 2, April . June 2023

Digital contents in virtual classrooms. An analysis in Ecuadorian education

• Search for different options to provide answers adapted to the

particular contexts of each group.

• Awaken creativity and initiative to better manage living

conditions in the home.

• Develop social-emotional competencies to best meet the

challenges posed by the changes brought about by the pandemic.

Currently, educational environments have evolved rapidly with

technological development and technical advances, this allows

students and teachers have the need to investigate the virtual

classrooms of learning technological platforms that exist to

strengthen meaningful learning, causing that obtaining their

knowledge is updated and driving the awakening of reasoning in all

people.

Maggio (2021) in his book Education in Pandemic points out that:

The virtual classrooms that were implemented as a strategy for

continuing education had been functioning as a sort of repository of

content and materials organized by subject or by units, and many

teachers who only worked in the classroom mode had never had the

intention of opening them for their courses, much less using them,

which were alien to them until the pandemic arrived (p. 14).

For his part, Pérez García (2021) maintains that:

Due to the COVID-19 health crisis at the beginning of 2020, all

educational levels had to adapt to a 100% online model, which

brought to light both training deficiencies and a lack of resources in

educational centers, widening, to a large extent, the digital gap

between different sectors of the population, and also between

different countries. Thus, the absence of a good Internet connection,

the lack of technological resources and the poor training of many

teachers in the didactic-creative use of technologies have been three

major factors of debate as a result of this socio-health crisis (p. 8).

Together with the possibilities offered by the virtual learning

classroom and the new technological resources available to us in the

21st century, we must not fail to analyze the reality of today's society

and the needs that arise from it, and to which it is also important to

respond from the educational system:

• Develop digital and critical thinking skills.

• Keeping up to date for a constantly changing working and

professional world makes continuous and updated training an

essential necessity to access, or remain in the working world.

Revista Iberoamericana de la Educación, Vol - 7 No. 2, April . June 2023

Digital contents in virtual classrooms. An analysis in Ecuadorian education

Therefore, the didactic proposals must favor diverse paths that can

be experienced by students based on choices that have to do with

their histories, tastes, styles and possibilities, which at the time of

providing technological resources as a tool to the teacher, must resort

to techniques that help facilitate learning for students, stimulate

interest in virtual techniques and ensure qualifications through

competency-oriented assignments.

MATERIALS AND METHODS

Within the educational institutions in Ecuador, education faced new

challenges: which was to achieve equity, equality and opportunities

to access quality education in times of pandemic COVID19. The

demands of social distancing, implied the need to resort to the virtual

learning classroom, ways to offer access to knowledge by students

with the support of virtual learning classroom technologies and

educational platforms.

For Begoña Tellería (2004), "ICTs did not appear at any moment in

history, but emerged at crucial moments, just when the control

systems of bureaucratic organizations, both public and private, were

in crisis, by increasing their structural complexity and breaking down

geographical boundaries" (p.19).

For this reason, educational institutions such as universities, colleges

and schools had to redefine the educational process, so in order to

implement the classes they had to create virtual classrooms through

various platforms such as Moodle, blackboard, Microsoft Teams,

among others.

This methodology was the one that many educational institutions had

to adapt, in accordance with what Delgado (2020) points out in which

he states that many institutions were forced to move their classes

from a face-to-face classroom to an online one, experimenting with

asynchronous and synchronous learning to see which one works

better or adapts better to their needs and their students.

According to Delgado (2020):

Online learning is divided into two categories: synchronous and

asynchronous learning. The former refers to education where

students have the opportunity to learn and interact in the moment (or

"live") with their teacher and peers and asynchronous learning that

can happen live or offline through videos, material or educational

resources previously provided by the teacher.

One of the great challenges faced by educational institutions in

Ecuador is that many teachers were not fully trained to face the

challenges involved in the use of digital material through various

Revista Iberoamericana de la Educación, Vol - 7 No. 2, April . June 2023

Digital contents in virtual classrooms. An analysis in Ecuadorian education

platforms, however, the work done within these tools depends on

whether students want to continue their studies or decide to abandon

them.

And although having a virtual classroom is a technological advance,

the reality is that many of these platforms only served as a repository

tool for the didactic material of the classes that are taught online; this

provides an opportunity to implement a communication model that is

applied in the elaboration and development of the content of the

courses, achieving a communicative, open and creative content

construction, through the joint elaboration between teachers and

students.

The very evolution of information technologies poses new challenges

to education, since in the future these will be the tools most used by

students due to the flexibility of being able to study online and the

constant use of these tools in an increasingly digital world.

RESULTS

With the new modalities of study through educational portals, the

need arises for the creation of numerous resources, tools, systems and

methodologies that have been developed over the last few years and

that teachers must analyze, understand and know in order to be able

to respond to these generated needs. The insertion of Information and

Communication Technologies (ICT) in education aims to facilitate,

improve and enhance learning and teaching, for which it is necessary

to reflect on the past, where educational materials consisted of books

and notebooks, making these processes monotonous and repetitive.

In the current context, classrooms and learning environments have

moved to what we know today as "Virtual Classrooms or virtual

portals", which have become spaces for interaction between the

actors of the educational process for the exchange of information and

content that will be uploaded through some type of digital resource

or didactic material.

In this sense, instructional design that is carried out with digital

resources is nothing more than the organization of the elements that

are used when planning the teaching. It includes the competencies

that students are expected to develop during the course of the subject

expressed in learning objectives. It also establishes the contents to be

covered, the pedagogical methodology to be applied, the didactic

resources and how they will be evaluated. Therefore, the contents

must be relevant for the achievement of objectives and competencies

to be developed by the participants in the training process. Regardless

Revista Iberoamericana de la Educación, Vol - 7 No. 2, April . June 2023

Digital contents in virtual classrooms. An analysis in Ecuadorian education

of the nature, the content designer must take care that the contents

are attractive, adapted to the web format, that they take advantage of

multimedia resources and hypertextuality.

Digital didactic resources are elements of the educational process that

have presented a significant evaluation as a result of the presence of

new technological tools, the usefulness of these materials in the

teaching and learning process is indisputable and focuses on the

interaction that is generated between students, teachers and content.

There is a current trend to consider e-activities as the focal point of

courses in virtual environments, according to which students have

more freedom of action and participation in the construction of

knowledge. It is based on a pedagogical model centered on the

student, who builds his learning by "doing" and "interacting" in the

learning community offered by the online platform. From this point

of view, very practical, collaborative activities are proposed, oriented

to problem solving or the development of higher order skills (Silva,

2017) according to figure 1:

Figure 1 . Model of virtual learning environment focused on e-

activities

Note: Prepared by the author of the project in Canvas. Source: Silva,

2017.

Another important element of the instructional design is the resources

that should be provided to the student to support study, understanding

of the content and achievement of the skills and learning objectives.

These will vary depending on the learning goals and the didactic

methodology adopted. An exemplification of didactic resources that

can be used according to the methodology applied can be seen, they

Revista Iberoamericana de la Educación, Vol - 7 No. 2, April . June 2023

Digital contents in virtual classrooms. An analysis in Ecuadorian education

can always be combined in the same course to deal with different

aspects of a subject.

López Regalado (1981) argues that educational resources have,

among other characteristics, the possibility of allowing

experimentation with models analogous to reality, symbolizing and

abstracting relationships between concepts, as well as providing

means to exercise or evaluate new learning.

Although it is debatable to define content as the center of teaching, it

is recognizable that it plays a leading and important role, since

communicative relationships are established between teachers and

students in which content has an intrinsic value that favors and

facilitates this process and its results.

Zapata Ros (2005), for his part, recognizes the need for educational

resources in the acquisition and development of the teaching and

learning process. "Each learning process requires specific conditions

that are different from others. Conditions to be determined through

planning and evaluation processes" p (4).

These learning conditions are determined by two elements:

educational resources and teaching strategies, and by the interaction

of both. It is important to consider the feasibility and functionality

that these digital didactic resources must have and their impact on

learning, verifying if the desired objectives are being obtained or if

they persuade students to acquire the contents in a dynamic way.

Establishing a classification for digital learning resources makes it

easier to analyze them, their use and impact on learning. "Didactic

materials or educational resources can be classified under several

criteria: by their physical presentation, by their format, by their level

of abstraction, by their persistence, by their granularity or by the

cognitive objectives they promote" (Aguilar Juárez et al., 2014,

p.74).

The most recommended is to combine educational resources that can

be of different nature: texts, audios, videos, various interactive

materials, and take advantage of the flexibility offered by technology

and select resources that are attractive, accessible to all, easy to use

and that have the least impact on creating a digital divide among

students.

Another element that cannot be forgotten in the design of online

courses is evaluation. Formative assessment is carried out during the

course and can be developed through collaborative activities, such as

Revista Iberoamericana de la Educación, Vol - 7 No. 2, April . June 2023

Digital contents in virtual classrooms. An analysis in Ecuadorian education

forums or participation in wikis, or through online quizzes or self-

assessment tests. And the summative evaluation involves all the

scoring activities that will contribute to the final grade or to the

achievement indicators of the learning goals set out in the course.

CONCLUSIONS

Although the pandemic forced many teachers not only in Ecuador but

also in Latin America to prepare themselves in the use of digital

educational tools, there is still a big gap to achieve a digital

competence of excellence in teachers, especially for those who teach

theoretical classes or for teachers with advanced ages, this opens a

great opportunity for educational institutions to continue training

their teaching staff in the use of new digital educational tools.

The rapid evolution of information and communication technologies

applied to education has led educational authorities, researchers and

teachers to seek new educational modalities that generate the greatest

possible coverage, guaranteeing the quality of services, methods and

content.

The fact that a teacher is trained allows him/her to create more

dynamic and practical educational resources, a more innovative

learning, allowing the implementation of educational resources that

facilitate curricular activities according to the educational needs of

his/her students.

REFERENCES

Begoña Tellería, M. (2004). Education and new technologies.

Distance Education and Virtual Education. Revista de Teoría y

Didáctica de las Ciencias Sociales, (9), 209-222.

https://www.redalyc.org/pdf/652/65200912.pdf

Delgado, P. (2020). Synchronous and asynchronous learning:

definition, advantages and disadvantages. Institute for the

Future of Education. Tecnológico de Monterrey.

https://observatorio.tec.mx/edu-news/aprendizaje-sincronico-

y-asincronico-definicion

López Regalado, O. (1981). Medios y Materiales educativos.

Facultad de Ciencias Histórico Sociales y Educación.

Universidad Nacional Pedro Ruiz Gallo.

https://docs.zohopublic.com/writer/published/b0tmj0e7e83bd

1d47474384b3800509678c77?mode=embed

Maggio, M. (2019). Educational portals: entrances and exits to the

Revista Iberoamericana de la Educación, Vol - 7 No. 2, April . June 2023

Digital contents in virtual classrooms. An analysis in Ecuadorian education

education of the future. In E. Buenos Aires: Paidós.

Pérez García, Álvaro (2021). Post pandemic online teaching: new

challenges. Holos, 37(2), 1-13.

https://doi.org/10.15628/holos.2021.12082

Silva, J. (2017). A virtual pedagogical model focused on E-activities.

Journal of Distance Education, (53).

http://dx.doi.org/10.6018/red/53/10

UNIR Magazine (2020). The TPACK methodology: what does this

model consist of and what are its advantages. UNIR.

Zapata Ros, M. (2005). Content sequencing and learning objects.

Journal of Distance Education (RED), (13). 1-39.

https://revistas.um.es/red/article/view/24411