Abstract:

The importance of developing digital competencies of educators is one of the current topics and tasks in education, generally, institutionally, at all levels and particularly for each educator. The necessity to continuously develop the skills has been actively analysed in the literature and proven in the pandemic and global lockdowns. Being aware that the digital revolution and changes, in general, have not brought equal changes to the education system, many educators are unsure about how digital technologies can and should be integrated into education (Caena & Redecker, 2019).

There are already frameworks that offer the foundation, structure that provide all stakeholders with the opportunity to improve and develop their digital competencies. As one of the key features of frameworks is built-in flexibility, it opens room for interpretations, creativity, and different forms of use (European Commission, 2013).

This paper embraces two frameworks, a national, Austrian digi.KompP and an international, DigCompEdu, for developing digital competencies for educators and shows the concrete application in practice in the form of a catalogue (collection) of the content.

By analysing these two frameworks we succeed in structuring the content for developing the digital competencies of our teaching staff at the University of Applied Sciences Upper Austria (UAS). We combined and adapted the categories and competencies (subcategories) of both frameworks to build a corresponding architecture that can meet the requirements of our digital learning catalogue. The items of this catalogue are all products of the Centre for Excellence in Teaching and Learning at UAS. The Centre performs different activities that can be grouped into several product types, such as events, training, materials, tutorials. All items of each product type can be categorised into one of the main categories, and after that, in one of the two or three subcategories of each category and assigned to one of the six progression levels, as suggested in the DigCompEdu.

Finally, this paper ties all elements together and offers a model for structuring the content for the digital continuous professional development of educators.

Keywords:

Digital competencies, digital skills, educators, digital continuous professional development (CPD).