Screencasts as Job Aids and the Basis of a Faculty Training Course

Education Institutions and its Faculty Skills in the Digital Era

In the opinion of the author of this chapter, who has 25 years of teaching experience in higher education, the skills that a professor at this level of education must possess today are the following:

• 1.

  To be an expert in his/her subject field (which includes keeping up to date with that field).

• 2.

  Design a good teaching strategy (prepare classes and their didactic materials well), which implies mastering face-to-face, distance and hybrid teaching strategies (which requires also solid ICT skills).

• 3.

  Teach classes in his/her subject field (helping students, who are apprentices in that area, to model the knowledge and skills of an expert in the field), which implies good communication and interpersonal skills.

• 4.

  Manage administrative aspects of teaching (e.g. register summaries, control attendance, send notifications to students).

• 5.

  Assist students, face-to-face and at a distance, if they need to clarify doubts outside of classes (i.e. provide office hours).

• 6.

  Assess students using: (i) formative assessment (granting students the possibility of confirming their learning at every moment – e.g. with self-assessment quizzes); (ii) summative assessment (ensuring that the learning objectives/skills of the curricular unit have been achieved); and (iii) sustainable assessment (to develop in students the ability to judge their own performance, that is, the quality of their learning). This implies giving good feedback to students.

Herman (2011) adds to the above skills the ability to conduct and publish good research, and to participate in the campus community (contribute to departmental projects and working groups). Not disagreeing with Herman's opinion, the list presented above focuses mainly on the relationship that a teacher has with his/her students, and not on other supplementary tasks.

ICT skills are referred by several authors as a core competence of the 21^st century teacher (Fichten et al., 2018; Fransson, Lindberg, & Olofsson, 2018; Kaarakainen, Kivinen, & Vainio, 2018), and there is no doubt that the covid-19 pandemic has revealed that these skills are indeed fundamental, in all teaching contexts.

The last competence on the list above presents sustainable assessment as its main novelty, a concept long defended by David Boud and his colleagues (2016). This type of assessment becomes increasingly relevant due to the greater autonomy that current students have in their own learning.

Perhaps the fourth competence in the above list is the one that is considered to be the least relevant of all. However, teachers can spend long hours of their time performing these more administrative tasks. Therefore, later in this chapter, a case study will be presented that documents the training given to a group of teachers on how to perform these bureaucratic tasks well.