Digital professional development: towards a collaborative learning approach for taking higher education into the digitalized age

Abstract

In Norway, digital skills are defined as an essential proficiency in the national curricular plans, and learning worldwide is in many ways changed by contemporary Web 2.0 technologies. Even so, teacher training is lagging behind when it comes to developing digital learning cultures and providing digital role models for future teachers. At the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU), we used a Massive Online Open Course (MOOC) approach to provide a digital professional development (DPD) program to faculties at the Department of Teacher Training. A main idea was to develop this program at the meso-level (horizontally) with some mutual structures and offerings, avoiding a top-down approach, which, based on experience, is likely to fail. The findings in this study present a four-step model, the collaborative learning approach (CLA), to account for the development and implementation of a blended learning MOOC (bMOOC) for professional digital competency development.