Dr. Careaga-Butter, Marcelo

We are living through a cultural transition, characterized by technological disruption and the erosion of the modern ideology, which are redefining the behavior of citizens in their physical and digital spaces. Virtuality emerges as a new human dimension, making it necessary to rethink social and educational paradigms for a new two-dimensional citizen. In this context, the psychometric features and validation procedure of an instrument (B-PLE) for analyzing Personal Learning Environments (PLE) in students of higher education institutions in the Biobío Region of Chile are described. There were four phases to the validation method: (i) content validity, as determined by six experts in education and ICT; (ii) pilot test, with a non-probabilistic sample of 327 subjects; (iii) principal components analysis (PCA); and (iv) confirmatory factor analysis (CFA). The results of the dimensional analysis made it possible to define the structure of the new instrument, explaining 72% of the total variance. The reliability analysis yielded an alpha coefficient of 0.92. The confirmatory factor analysis showed fit indexes that support the proposed theoretical model. In conclusion, the instrument was composed of three latent variables: Open learning (OL), with six questions, Information management (IM), with two questions, and Knowledge creation and transfer (KCT), with three questions.

Humanity, prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, was already in the process of a gradual cultural transition between modernity and postmodernity. The rapid pace of scientific and technological advances has led humans towards a progressive adaptation, as they develop new ways to confront and to solve their problems. In the exceptional context of the pandemic, people and institutions have faced a sudden need to readapt their ways of life and their means of communication. In education, the need to migrate from traditional classrooms to online systems was urgent, and the shift required digital tools and resources to support teaching. This theoretical article aims to analyze the disruption in the educational context and to detail the adaptations that may contribute to the effectiveness of educational processes. Moreover, it discusses the pedagogical, methodological, didactic, and evaluative aspects of the change in education. The article also proposes some guidelines for learning on both synchronous and asynchronous platforms. The trends associated with these changes are analyzed in order to offer a perspective on education in the post-pandemic world.