Teachers’ Ideas about Students and their Teaching Practices

Abstract

In Argentina, the use of virtual environments in e-learning or in blended learning designs is mostly a question of individual willingness or that of a small group. Considering the local context, we analyzed the narratives of ten university teachers who began to use a virtual environment as a complement to their regular classes. The analysis axes were characterizations of their ideal and regular students, conceptions about group collaborative learning, and expected fears and difficulties with the experience to come. Teachers emphatically described the differences between their usual students and their ideal students. They normally proposed collaborative tasks for their students and positively valued this type of teaching strategy. Nevertheless, the most important expected difficulty was the technical management of the platform and the results showed diversity with respect to their anticipated difficulties. It emerged from the data that one of the main concerns of teachers was the students’ motivation in terms of both regular classes and for the future use of Moodle.