A prospective view of Virtual Education in Autonomous Decentralized Governments: a case study of Honorable Provincial Government of Tungurahua

Abstract

Governments distribute resources according to their strategic planning to develop studies in a variety of competence areas. Therefore, due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the need to establish citizen participation processes through training has increased, however it cannot be carried out in a complete face-to-face way due to the pandemic. In this context, the use of innovative technological tools is necessary to establish teaching-learning processes. The Honorable Provincial Government of Tungurahua through its Citizen Training Center has implemented an educational platform to provide training services in order to encourage Tungurahua citizen participation, located in the central region of Ecuador that has nine provinces and has a population of 590,600 people. By introducing innovative training processes using technology, this study attempts to solve the need for virtual training and also seeks citizen participation to strengthen and maintain training services during the pandemic. 422 people participated in this study, of which 67.54% belonged to the female gender and 32.46% to the male gender, from this total 70.14% had university education. In order to collect information about people’s training needs, an online 15 questions survey was conducted. These results made it possible to establish that 90% of the participants have an interest in digital literacy processes as well as in a variety of interesting topics that would allow them to increase their knowledge. Finally, a proposal was designed to implement the virtual environment using Moodle. The online environment was designed between the months of March and September 2020 and allowed the development of ten virtual training processes with the participation of 1,817 people, of which 47% were women and 53% men. In addition, it was found that 74% of the participants were residents and 26% were rural residents. In addition, their age ranged between 18 and 29 years, which represents 76% of the total participants.

Keywords: Training, E Government, Virtual Training, Pandemic, Citizen Participation

DOI: 10.54941/ahfe1001105