Electronic Learning During Pandemia

Electronic learning during pandemia

At present, a pandemic caused by the Covid 19 virus is lived worldwide, which is spread by close contact with a virus carrier cause causing the population to take certain measures for their protection.  At the moment, WHO notified more than 2 million cases confirmed by COVID 19 and more 123,000 deaths worldwide on April 16.In Peru, due to this disease, different supreme decrees were declared, in the last of them a sanitary emergency extension was declared until May 10 throughout the Peruvian territory. At the same time, prevention and control measures were announced, one of them is the mandatory social immobilization, which exempts any entity that does not belong to the area of first need to work. This affects the development of university students, since it generates that the type of learning changes from b-learning to a completely virtual.

Virtual learning is that education to which every person connected to the Internet that presents limitations with traditional learning, such as transport difficulties, accommodation and availability of time and money, can access one with the same quality.  In virtual learning, different virtual training platforms are used, which allow access to an educational interface where information is administered to students, enables mutual communication with their teachers and provides the latter to carry out evaluations.  As the Internet reaches more places and technology evolves, the virtual learning environment will change alongside, so it is considered dynamic.

Then, the term of virtual learning environment applies to that space that generates knowledge and presents different types of tools, so that they must be used and used properly by teachers and students in educational centers, especially in higher education. Among them is the Blackboard Collaborate, which is used in our study population.

Regarding the perception of students in virtual learning environments, Fernández, Ferrer and Reig pointed out that the environments with greater value were: the support of the teacher, autonomy and active learning, unlike the interaction and collaboration between students which he obtaineda lower value. However, Walker and Fraser indicated in their study that the interaction and collaboration in students are important, but that they are not an exclusive element in creating a quality distance education.  In another study it was found that one of the barriers for learning in virtual environments is the lack of strategy in e-learning management, which is related to learning environments.

The social presence is the degree of perceiving other people with focused attention, affective compression and being able to create with them an affectic and behavioral interdependence. Of which it is important to take into account the affective, motivational and relational processes to elaborate a better learning in virtual environments.

Katernyak found that, in virtual learning, both the teacher and the students have a high degree of perception towards the other person, since they have the right to participate in the learning events in which the power to ask questions and answers is included inwhere everyone’s participation is evaluated. Likewise, Aguet indicates that when students feel connected to their classmates in the virtual environment and have the possibility of expressing themselves, sharing an opinion or requesting help from other people results in better learning. On the other hand, Baez proposes to guide the design of learning platforms having the social presence as one of its central axes. In this way, generate that virtual learning platforms improve their focus in a simpler and more realistic way in interaction to promote participation and collaboration. 

Different studies have been carried out investigating the relationship between the perception of virtual environments in learning and social presence making it possible to obtain prior knowledge about the factors related to virtual learning. Of which several indicate that the social presence demonstrates to be an important factor in understanding the interactions established in the students.  Although there is a great advance of technology, the interactivity in e-learning learning has not yet been improved because a more humanized learning environment is not yet created.  For example, in the study of Young, its population referred to having obtained deep learning, which is due to the careful construction of learning environments. 

On the other hand, there is little research on learning environments in Spanish -speaking students.  Therefore, it is necessary to carry out a study in which information on the perception of virtual learning of students can be obtained, especially when quarantine happened suddenly and when all educational institutions have expanded their training offers through virtual environments.