Teaching in Virtual Environments: New Roles and Tasks

In this article is described the research done in the National Pedagogic University of Colombia (MSc studies on Communication and Informatics Technologies Applied in Education) on teachers practicing in virtual environments, the new roles, tasks and competences which define them. The inquiry starts from the analysis and the relationship the researcher establishes among studies, theories and different works that have been done related to the integration of Computing and Information Technologies (CIT) in the education, that is a situation that force us to reconsider teaching practice to meet the expected competences and tasks that guides the teaching-learning work. Related to the methodological development of this work, active teachers were consulted either with or without experience on CIT adoption in their professional practice. The research allows us to identify the competences and tasks they consider the most and the less significant for having a successful performance on teaching in virtual educational environments. Among the findings we identify the cognitive and attitudinal competences like: to generate autonomous-collaborative learning and to represent the knowledge and ability to design the curriculum integrating the CITs.