Distance Education in USAT

Distance Education in USAT

 

 By: Fiorela Anai Fernandez Otoya
Professor assigned to the Department of Science Education

Globalization has enabled distance education offers multiple opportunities for countries to achieve competence through university systems. The explosion of new knowledge has also been due to the impressive increase of training programs in development and training, and above all to the great technological advances that have allowed to optimize distance education; for this reason USAT teachers must incorporate to their innovative task these new alternatives in order to improve the quality of service provided by the university.

Distance education offers a number of benefits including balancing the educational inequalities between age groups; to expand geographically to the access into education, allows the combination of work and family life to the study, train large groups of individuals and provide quick and effective training for specific groups.

In addition you can also expand education in new and multidisciplinary areas, developing variety skills, enhancing the international dimension of education, increasing the quality of educational services, preparing individuals for the knowledge society.

Nowadays there are many online tools that help to facilitate communication and to generate knowledge, among them we have the Wikis, virtual libraries, virtual classrooms, e-mail ,forums, video conference, self-assessments, virtual platforms, etc., so USAT teachers must know and manage these variety of tools to put them into context in each working sessions that they have with students to develop skills and offer progressively more new things that make effectively and efficiently possible the university work.

Saint Toribio de Mogrovejo Catholic University has already had a Unit of Distance Education, that depends on the Academic Vice President, whose goal is to provide support to all USAT schools in the training of digital materials and designing of methodologies to adapted courses, seminars, conferences, symposia, second specialty, masters and doctorates from the face to face mode to the virtual mode in order to deal with the demands of the professional long - life learning.

USAT Distance Education Unit started its activities with a video conference about awareness on e-learning and a design of digital educational materials course and the use of the USAT virtual classroom. Soon an online survey will be sent to know their virtual needs and to program activities through workshops. We are sure that together we will make virtual innovation in USAT a peculiar feature to the entire university community

Fiorela Fernández Otoya