ACADEMIC E-TEACHING QUALIFICATIONS IN GERMANY, AUSTRIA AND SWITZERLAND. DIFFERENT WAYS TO FIT ONE GOAL

Using digital media to support academic education is more and more common at german universities. German politics support the efforts to spread the use of digital media by academics with the implementation of different national support programmes. By focusing on e-teaching as topic of this paper, the authors want to strengthen the perspective on the academic teaching staff, their media consumption habits and competencies. Current studies show that the use of digital media in academic education is limited to organizational aspects such as providing material and information online. More complex settings to face didactical problems such as activation or e-assessment in courses with high attendance rates are rarely realized. To develop the competencies of academic teaching staff for using digital media in their courses different German universities run qualification programmes under the name e-teaching. In addition there are some programmes of further education that develop similar competencies.

The term e-teaching is used in contrast to the term e-learning to focus on the aspects of teaching instead of learning. We understand e-teaching as the didactic motivated choice of digital media to create formal teaching settings. In Germany the competencies for e-teaching are discussed in various contexts. Some authors discuss those competencies as extension to teaching competencies, others focus on the media consumption and strengthen media literacies in academic contexts. These theoretical contributions will be summarized and discussed in order to find correlations to the didactical concepts of the existing qualification programmes.

In an empirical study we searched for different qualification programmes addressing competencies for e-teaching and compared them in regard to didactical concepts, provided contents, educational objectives, workload and organizational contexts. We found a total of 31 e-teaching qualification programmes in Germany, Austria and Switzerland. Ten of them address especially academic staff. 21 are provided by universities. The paper wants to present the detailed findings of this analysis.