New ICTs and new needs: teacher training and the accessibility of ICTs in higher education

Abstract

The incorporation of ICTs in the educational field results in new alternatives, new habits, and new needs. In the case of teachers, their ability to work and integrate technological devices or tools to make them more accessible in the future becomes highly relevant. In recent years, technical possibilities such as Massive Open Online Courses (MOOC), Open Educational Resources (OERs), gamification, video streaming platforms, or transversal managers such as Google Classroom have been emerging. Possibilities that involve different scenarios of the teaching-learning process were especially enhanced during the pandemic caused by SARS-CoV-2. This results in a necessary and continuous reflection on the preparation of teachers in the didactic application of ICTs in the short, medium, and long term. All this is placed in the context of higher education, a stage always linked to technological innovation and one which promotes research in the field of education. For this reason, in the present work, it is exposed in different sections how the technological change has been gaining pace resulting in a conceptual development around ICTs in the classroom. At the same time, it analyses how teacher training in higher education is a problem of the present and future, which is why it acquires a key relevance.