The integration of emerging technologies is reshaping the teaching skills required in the 21st century, yet little evidence exists on how contextualized training supports rural teachers in adopting active methodologies and critically incorporating AI into entrepreneurship education. This study evaluated the impact of a 40-h professional development program implemented in Educational District 15D01 in the Ecuadorian Amazon. Thirty-nine secondary school teachers participated (mean age = 43.1 years); 36% lacked prior entrepreneurship training, and 44% had not recently mentored student projects. A sequential explanatory mixed-methods design was employed. The quantitative phase employed a 22-item questionnaire that addressed four dimensions: entrepreneurial knowledge, competencies, methodological strategies, and AI integration. Significant pre–post improvements were found (p < 0.001), with large effects for knowledge (d = 1.43), methodologies (d = 1.39), and AI integration (d = 1.30), and a moderate effect for competences (d = 0.66). The qualitative phase analyzed 312 open-ended responses, highlighting greater openness to innovation, enhanced teacher agency, and favorable perceptions of AI as a resource for ideation, prototyping, and evaluation. Overall, the findings suggest that situated, contextually aligned training can strengthen digital equity policies, foster pedagogical innovation, and empower educators in underserved rural communities, contributing to sustainable pathways for teacher professional development.

The marginal role of higher education in Latin America led to technological dependency, poor economic growth, and social inequity. In the article, we discuss the challenging context in which higher education in Latin America developed and explain the motives behind the creation of a public university in the tropical rain forest of Ecuador. New and reformed higher education institutions in Latin America require innovative approaches to design academic programs and implement novel educational paradigms. We propose a quantitative and unorthodox method for analyzing the structure of program curricula in this historical and social context. This approach highlights the need for strategic academic planning and informed public policies. The inherent variation in program curricula across universities can be systematized in a presence-absence matrix, with courses and academic programs as columns and rows. By representing the patterns of variation in curricular structure across universities in the space provided by canonical axes, new perspectives arise which can lead to the development of further discussions towards optimal and innovative academic programs. The methods presented could be extended into the study of how academic disciplines, fields of study, and conceptual approaches to the design of program curricula vary and are structured across sociocultural contexts.