Analysis of Content: Information and Communication Technologies Integration in Higher Education

Abstract

This case study is based on a research conducted in 2014, whose framework is the integration of Information and Communication Technologies as learning tools in educational contexts. During the last decades, the number of works about this topic has increased exponentially, yet some key points of this phenomenon are still unknown, largely as a consequence of the lack of research in natural settings. This study looks carefully at the Content of Learning, the Teacher, and the Students, three main elements in any formal educational context, and analyzes their relation when they are mediated by Information and Communication Technologies. To do this, we decided to conduct a case study based on one teacher who showed high proficiency using Information and Communication Technologies in previous studies, and we observed and analyzed his practice in the classroom. In this case, we describe the whole research process followed, based on the content analysis method, from early stages, when we got just too general ideas, until we developed specific and useful categories of analysis. Additionally, we show some difficulties we found during the research process and propose some tips to face them.