El trabajo colaborativo en entornos virtuales en educación superior

Abstract

The main interest in this study is to describe and understand the potential of collaborative work in virtual environments, in the field of higher education. The problem presents the complexity of any holistic study, since it intends to represent the ensemble of factors involved in a situation of collaborative learning mediated by technology. Thus, we have tried to cater the institutional view, the teacher perspective and the classroom environment, in which students are protagonists. This approach has been necessary to deal with the cognitive, organizational and social elements that interact in collaborative work, which involve the development of a variety of competences in teachers and result in diverse learning. The holistic perspective of the study led to a literature review that, on the first hand, would frame e-learning and, in particular, collaborative learning in the field of higher education. This way, we incorporated the institutional vision and the scope of technologies. Chapter 1 deals with the challenges of universities in Spain to align with the evolution of a society that has widely adopted technologies. Maintaining an innovative perspective implies a culture of flexibility and change making, which doesn‘t seem an easy task in a context with few resources and where laws are conditioned by government alternation. The real change that has affected higher education is the fact that while 50 years ago society and institutions fed off almost exclusively in relation to knowledge, changes caused by the arrival of technologies have reached the structural level, leading to a revision of universities mission and vision. This has led to the articulation of initiatives revolving around the role of technologies in higher education, like the Conferencia de Rectores de las Universidades Españolas (CRUE), created in 1994 and formed by 75 universities, 50 of them public and 25 private which. The Comisión sectorial de Tecnologías de la Información y las Comunicaciones de la Conferencia de Rectores de Universidades Españolas (CRUE-TIC) (Sectorial commission of Information and Communication Technologies) was established in the year 2003...