Technological changes: questions and challenges of virtualized university teaching work in Argentina

Abstract

This proposal is part of an investigation entitled "Technological changes: new challenges for labor relations and professional training" proposed and developed within the framework of the Scientific Research, Development and Transfer of Technologies and Innovations Program (CyTMA 2) of the University Nacional de La Matanza, whose main aspiration lies in characterizing how technological changes affect the field of labor relations, requiring the training of new skills in workers.

In this sense, as researchers, we proposed, when outlining the project, to focus on the actors in the world of work and the new skills they should acquire as a consequence of the technological changes and the new forms of employment that originate. More specifically, we seek to reconstruct the perspective of the actors in the world of work and the State associated with employment and training policies on technological and organizational change in labor relations and in the required occupational skills.
In Argentina, from the application of the Preventive and Mandatory Social Isolation (ASPO) decreed by the national government on March 19, 2020, with the aim of reducing the contagion rate of COVID-19, the world of work was gone through endless modifications. Among them, one of the activities mainly crossed by the virtualization processes, turned out to be the teaching work evidencing a notorious heterogeneity regarding the scope and possibilities of the different sectors, levels and houses of study in order to face the new conditions imposed by the pandemic. Tensions linked to “pedagogical continuity” and the “suspension of face-to-face classes” generated debates and reflections at the university level. The purpose of this proposal involves presenting a state of the art regarding the vectors that characterize virtualized teaching work currently in the field of Higher Education, focusing on the particularities acquired in the context of Preventive and Mandatory Social Isolation decreed by the COVID Pandemic 19 In this sense, the objective of this work is to explore the academic proposals disclosed, and to install the need to problematize the various edges of the virtualization of this face-to-face work, mostly in Argentina. At the methodological level, secondary sources were used for the development of the investigative process. At the national level, the search was made possible through the COVID-19 collection, a conglomerate of articles on the subject that are housed in the various repositories of the institutions that make up the National System of Digital Repositories (SNRD) and at the international level in repositories Latin American (Network of Latin American repositories) and Spanish (Digital Repository of the University of Barcelona).

KEY WORDS: teaching work - technological changes - university education