Higher Education in the Pacific Alliance: Use of ICT Tools among University Professors

The integration of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) in higher education is, on the one hand, a need in today's digital world, increased by the recent COVID-19 pandemic, and, on the other, one of the strategic objectives of the countries of the Pacific Alliance (PA) –Chile, Colombia, Mexico, and Peru–. This paper develops a quantitative, descriptive, and correlational research on the assessments that university professors from PA countries make of their digital competence, the didactic use of ICT, and the impact that the COVID-19 pandemic has had in the habits of the use of ICT in the lectures. For this, a validated questionnaire has been used, which has been passed to a sample of 731 professors from the PA countries and whose responses were statistically analyzed. As a result, it has been identified that the assessment given of ICT is very high and that its use has grown after the pandemic in general, but unevenly among the different countries of the PA. Finally, it is suggested to increase the digital training of professors and implement measures to correct geographical gaps and favor digital integration in the region.