INSTITUTIONAL PRACTICES FOR ADOPTION OF DISTANCE LEARNING/B-LEARNING IN HIGHER EDUCATION INSTITUTIONS: PROMOTING TEACHERS MOTIVATION

In this paper, we present the work that has been recently developed in University of Tras-os-Montes e Alto Douro (UTAD) to promote teachers' motivation for the use of technologies in their pedagogical practices. UTAD is a portuguese higher education institution that, despite the initiatives that have been developed since 2010, continues to growth regarding the effective adoption of Information and Communication Tools (ICT) in the pedagogical practices of its teachers. UTAD has a technical and pedagogical support team that assists in the process of designing educational activities with ICTs and has carried out different strategies that allow the dissemination of ICT in pedagogical practices. Based on the findings of a questionnaire that was applied to assess the main motivation factors (needs and expectations) for the adoption of the technologies by teachers, measures were implemented, and the results are starting to show up, including the development of two massive open online courses (MOOCs), several non-degree training courses being prepared to be taught in b-learning mode, and teachers of different scientific areas are developing multimedia content to be part of an online component of their classes.