Organization and planning of university faculty training in virtual classrooms for the inclusion of people with disabilities

Abstract

Despite the proliferation of conventions, declarations, and recommendations for inclusive education, many students with disabilities do not complete their university studies. To overcome this situation, university faculty must have skills in inclusion and motivation, but the training of teachers in these subjects is still limited. For all these reasons, this work conveys a basic training proposal -adjusted to the teacher’s reality- to improve the organization and planning of this training. With this training proposal, this study aims to answer how training can facilitate online university teachers to acquire knowledge to improve their skills and motivation in students with disabilities inclusion. For this purpose, qualitative research has been carried out based on the responses to an open-ended questionnaire by 20 expert teachers in online university training who have received and evaluated this training. Although the results have shown that the proposed online training of university teachers may be effective in improving their competencies and motivation in the inclusion of students with disabilities, they still need some improvement -according to the suggestions made by the teachers participating in the study-. Most of these suggestions made by high-level teachers especially recommended the ones related to conceptual clarification, presentation of case studies or examples, and description of actions in the didactic field.