Validation of edudemia – state of the art – Digital Skills @ UniDistance

Society’s changing demands and technological developments challenge higher education teacher’s professionalism continuously. In consequence, governments, public offices and international organizations launch top-down educational policies promoting both higher education teachers’ professional development and definitions of competence frameworks more or less rigorously based on empirical research and evidence. Constructions of e. g. the “21^st century citizen” suggest universal values and with them universal competence frameworks. Effectively, such values and frameworks are culturally and historically bound containing a certain degree of normativity. Thus, competence frameworks have to be empirically validated to assure that they ground on consensus. Literature survey, analyses of institutional practices and contexts alone do not meet validation requirements even though the result, a new competence framework, edudemia, was constructed inductively. Our framework will be validated as follows:

Method ::
- Two-round large-scale DELPHI*.
  - Participants are required to evaluate 5 areas of competence and 37 competencies answering four questions about each area / competence: are they relevant for higher education teaching? Are they required in their daily routine? Are they becoming increasingly important for development and quality of higher education teaching? Are they understandably formulated?
    Participants are also required to attribute each of the 37 competencies to the five areas of competence aiming at validating the framework’s content.
  - After evaluating this first data set, areas of competence and competencies will be revised, and a new questionnaire will be launched to validate the indicators.
Sample:
- higher education teachers in Swiss Universities and other higher education institutions
- different Swiss geographic and language areas

The enquiry will be launched in autumn 2020. First results are expected early 2021 and will be published here.

* The DELPHI-Method is often adopted for this kind of research question. Usually, the validation process includes the recruitment of experts and consultation phases. In this case, teachers in higher education are considered as experts in the field as practicians who are confronted every day with pedagogic and didactic challenges as well as with societal demands. A large number of teachers in higher education from different regions in Switzerland will be consulted.

Literature