Abstract:

For nearly 15 years students in Norway have been expected use technology in all school subjects, and with the implementation of a new curriculum autumn 2020, with increased focus on digital competence, this expectation is emphasised further. In the new curricula, digital competence is seen as a cross-curricular competence as well as being part of other cross-curricular competences such as critical thinking, communication and collaboration.

The competence and practice of teachers are decisive factors for whether students will be able to develop these competences. In order to contribute to developing students’ competence, teachers are expected to develop their own professional digital competence (PDC). Teachers’ PDC is defined as a profession-based digital competence relevant to teaching (Ottestad, Kelentric, & Gudmundsdóttir, 2014; Kelentrić, Helland, & Arstorp, 2017), and teachers are expected to develop this competence both during their pre-service teacher education, and later, through continuing professional education and development, during their teaching career.

Nevertheless, research both in Norway and internationally, indicate that many teachers do not feel confident using technology in the classroom due to a lack of PDC. To address this issue, two Norwegian universities have collaborated on the development of two professional development courses for in-service teachers; a PDC Mooc and a teacher specialist education in PDC. Both courses build on the “Framework for teacher’s professional digital competence” (Kelentrić, Helland, & Arstorp, 2017) and aim to help teachers identify the core content of a teacher’s PDC and acquire the knowledge, skills and general competences needed in order to become a digitally competent teacher. The first course, the PDC Mooc, is fully online, and consists of two main parts; one part focusing on general PDC and one part focusing on subject specific PDC.

The second course, the teacher specialist education is a blended course on master level (60 ECTS over two years), focusing on development of the competences needed in order to become a teacher specialist within the field of PDC. Thus, while the first course aims to contribute to developing the participants own PDC, the aim of the latter is to educate teachers who can contribute to professional development activities in their respective schools.

So far, 24 teachers have finished the first year of the teacher specialist education and another 34 will have completed the first semester by Christmas 2019. Corresponding numbers for the PDC Mooc show that 315 teachers completed the course last year, and by Christmas another 260 teachers will have finished the first part and are ready to continue to the subject-specific part.

Figures from a newly published study on experienced learning outcome from participating in professional development for in-service teachers in Norway show that teachers who have completed the PDC Mooc rate their learning outcome from the course to 4.9 on a 6-point scale (Gjerustad & Pedersen, 2019). We believe that these figures, along with the high number of teachers who have completed the courses, can be seen as an indication that our model for professional development of in-service teachers has been effective. Therefore, we wish to present our model as an example of how universities can work systematically in order to contribute to increasing the ICT competencies among in-service teachers.

Keywords:

In-service teachers, professional digital competence, teacher specialist, MOOC.