A European Digitalisation Strategy

Striving towards a digital transformation of the European teacher education system, one result of the project – the development of a European Digitalisation Strategy – responds to many of the needs and challenges that teacher educators face in their working context: 

First, it addresses the need to connect and coordinate professional learning across borders and disciplines, inside and outside of institutions. It does so by generating concrete action plans, detailed strategies and recommendations to incorporate the digital professional development of teacher educators on an institutional, national and European level. 

Thus, it secondly sets the digitalisation among teacher educators as a policy focus, thereby meeting the need for systematic and practice-oriented European and also national and institutional digitalisation strategies for the training of teacher educators. We believe that major improvements to ensure and enhance the quality and relevance of the digitalisation among teacher educators can only take place in an ecosystem of strong institutional, national and European support. 

This project result will further comprise the production of actions for the accreditation of qualifications of teacher educators in regard to their digital learning. This addresses the need to evaluate and recognise (European) qualifications for teacher educators. These will include suggestions of possible arrangements to recognise and validate the outcomes of physical/virtual short-term staff mobility in regard to teacher educators’ digital learning. 

As such, the target groups of this result are consequently teacher educators, university leaders, and policy-makers on a national and European level. Its innovative element lies within the fact that none of the partner universities or countries involved in the consortium, nor the European Union has developed a strategy for the digitalisation of teacher educators yet.