Disruptive and innovative models: a response from higher education to the COVID-19 pandemic

Abstract

COVID-19, It has become a pandemic that strongly affects all countries, unleashing multiple crises in the sanitary, economic and health order.

One of the most affected spheres is education at all levels, with the growth of the digital strip, social inequalities and the impossibility of guaranteeing access to education, especially to the most vulnerable sectors of cities and areas. rural.

In this context, the States must develop inclusive policies in the health, economic, social, productive, poverty alleviation and education order.

This contingent effort can only be fruitful with the participation of the private sector, the deployment of initiatives from the different strata and sectors of society.

In the field of education, undoubtedly the little or no connectivity of large regions of the country and the lack of technological infrastructures make it even more difficult to implement successful policies.

Despite this gloomy scenario, most of the countries have given responses from their own conditions to give continuity to education with the required quality.

Ecuador has found these alternative responses in the implementation of new learning environments in virtual, online and hybrid modalities, developing instruments and tools that correctly combine the necessary disruption with educational innovation and point towards the consolidation of new models and strategies of teaching-learning, of teachers empowered in their new roles as strategic teachers, mediators of all components of the teaching-learning process with emphasis on the components of experimentation, autonomous work, formative research and solution to environmental problems.

And the essential complement is the strategic student manager of his own process of knowledge construction, professional and personal training, with a sense of social responsibility, committed and participant in the search / solution of answers to the needs of society.