TEACHING AND LEARNING IN VIRTUAL ENVIRONMENTS. A LOOK AT THE STUDENT'S ROLE

Abstract

Education through virtuality has developed in a vertiginous way in today's society, complementing and, in many cases replacing, face-to-face. This new form of organization of educational activity implies much more than the incorporation of digital technologies. On the contrary, the entire pedagogical context: teachers, students, teaching materials, are modified. This article presents a bibliographic research oriented, firstly, to characterize the profile of the virtual student and later, to the search for antecedents of Latin American investigations mainly, that address the study of the factors that affect the dropout in this educational modality. The final results indicate that virtuality requires students with personal characteristics and skills that, a priori, are not always present and that the educational experience itself must develop. On the other hand, virtuality, even at higher educational levels, maintains the same challenges of coverage and curricular progress as face-to-face modalities, contributing more to equity in access than to permanence and graduation.