Educational Technologists during the COVID 19 pandemic: Recommendations for the post-pandemic Latin American University

During 2020, in the context of the health emergency caused by COVID19, Universidad de la República (Udelar) already had installed capacities (human and technological) that allowed it to continue teaching activities uninterruptedly. This was possible thanks to different factors that gave continuity to the educational processes of that year: the consolidation of the Virtual Learning Environments (VLE), as widely used spaces throughout the educational community, the deployment of highly trained human resources in charge of the VLE in each educational technology service and a basic technological infrastructure. This article tries to give an account of the state of the human resources associated with the educational technology services, its main characteristics. In addition, an approach to what has been the development of their tasks in the context of a health emergency is presented. A mixed methods study was carried out during the second semester of 2020 and first semester of 2021. The results obtained show a consolidation of the educational technologists role in the university. A greater visibility of the tasks they perform due to the increase in demand by the educational community caused by the Emergency Remote Teaching (ERT) was highlighted. However, no significant increases have been made in the assigned workloads or in new hires to enable a greater response from the educational technology services around the digital education activities during COVID 19 ERT. Analysis and recommendations on educational, organizational and technological dimensions can be extended to other Latin American universities to face the challenge of post-pandemic digital education. © 2022 IEEE.

Teacher education in the emergency: pedagogies of care

Covid-19 pandemic sprang up a process that would drastically change the ways to teach and learn, deepening and accelerating the relationship between technologies and educational processes.The emergency situation challenged Universidad de la Republica (Udelar), which in turn designed and implemented remote teaching devices that allowed the continuity of higher education, minimizing academic impacts. Within this frame of action, the Virtual Learning Environments Program elaborated a Contingency Plan for teaching and learning, with an approach that considered pedagogy of care and critical digital pedagogy. One of the actions implemented was the Teacher Development Course "Teaching Online in Emergency Conditions".The experience constitutes the first massive online open course in Udelar and it is one of the few of this sort in Uruguay.The article describes this innovative experience in teacher pedagogical development, presents the theoretical and methodological approach, the process and main decisions concerning the course design.Also, it describes main participation profiles and principal achievements of the experience, with the objective of identifying potential points of departure for teaching professional development initiatives based on the MOOC model. MOOCs are still at an initial stage;however, the proposal ended up being an enriching alternative to approach teacher professional development.This experience adds up empirical data, to a necessary accumulation that would in time, allow more generalizable appreciations.