Abstract:

Introduction:
In the last ten years higher education in Sweden has undergone major changes related to two specific parallel processes. First a process of digitalization, secondly an academisation process of what has previously been regarded as mainly vocational programmes for professions being delivered by other institutions than the universities. Examples of these are police education (Sjöberg, 2016) and fire-fighter training (Holmgren, 2015). The competence of the educators responsible for such programmes as well as the particular educational context for providing the courses are being re-defined.

Central in this paper is the concept of Pedagogical Digital Competence (PDC) (Hall & From, 2013). PDC relates to the ability of teachers to plan and conduct, and continuously evaluate and revise, Information and Communication Technology (ICT)-supported training, based on theory, current research and proven experience in practice. PDC includes both practical (know-how) and conceptual (know-why) knowledge.

During fall 2016, intensive organizational preparations as well as training of police teachers took place at the university in question with the purpose of being able to teach police students at a distance in spring of 2017. Important here was a course intended to develop the police educators´ PDC in order to make the move to a distance context and the ability to design distance courses. The course included learning theories and digital tools as well as in-practice training to increase the police teachers’ knowledge and skills in the tools and implement them in their teaching in practice. The attention in this paper is directed towards the PDC needed to be developed by police teachers in the context of the newly re-designed distance-based Swedish police education.

Aim:
The aim of this paper is to present a study of the police teachers self-rated abilities according to the model of PDC before and after a professional development course in ICT in education.

Data and research design:
Data consists of 21 police teachers who before and after the course made a self-evaluation of their PDC. The survey used consisted of three background questions and 28 statements with likert-scale answers. The statements corresponded to the police teachers’ self-evaluated knowledge in the domains of the so called Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge (TPACK) model as it was developed by Mishra & Koehler (2006, 2008). The paper also uses data from the course evaluations.

Context:
The plan for the PDC course was based on course development parallel with the police teachers gaining knowledge in new digital tools. During the course different digital tools were used to provide the teachers with ideas and they had the opportunity to work hands on with digital tools. Each course meeting included guest lectures providing good examples and best practice regarding the use of digital tools in the teaching practice. All in all the course consisted of five meetings.

Conclusions:
Tentative conclusions from the data shows that following the TPACK model the teachers on average was strongest on their content knowledge (CK) followed by their pedagogical knowledge (PK). On average they were weakest on the four knowledge domains related to technology. After they had finished the course their knowledge in these domains had moved and changed so that they now were stronger than before.

Keywords:

Police Education, Police Teachers, Distance Education, Pedagogical Digital Competence.