La relación educativa en propuestas formativas en línea Estudio de caso desde las percepciones de los estudiantes

Abstract

Universities are currently undergoing virtualization processes that operate on their structural bases and must be interpreted in the context of the transformations that societies undergo. At the beginning of the century, Garrison, Anderson and Archer (2000) introduced the Community of Inquiry (CoI) model which describes how learning takes place within a community, through the interaction of three nuclear elements that make up the core of an educational experience: cognitive presence, social presence and teacher presence. In this framework, the creation of links is presented as a vital necessity in any training intervention and a prevalent factor in the development of academic commitment, especially in the field of higher education. In line with the above, we propose to investigate how interpersonal relationships –and more specifically the teacher-student link– affect the development of academic commitment in university students of a distance-taught career, studied through a virtual platform. This approach to our object is materialized from the students' perspective through a qualitative methodology, of an exploratory-descriptive nature, framed in a case study. The “teacher-student link” emerges associated with the “affective dimension”, a component of the “social presence” element in the CoI model. Its properties are: "accompaniment", "positive reinforcement", "generosity" and "stimulation". In this way, the affective dimension and the vocation for proximity to the student transcend the physical space, and online interventions are configured as powerful generators of interpersonal relationships. This translates into a reciprocal treatment, since a relationship of presence and proximity between the participants of a curricular path is established, producing interactions that allow a real knowledge of the other. Additionally, generation of interpersonal links is defined as a nuclear factor in the development of academic commitment in online training proposals. From a relational perspective, the strengthening of interpersonal links has a central impact on education which is also verified in the virtual space, evidencing a marked personalization of the process.