Digital competence analysis to inform current pedagogy and curricula
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.7203/realia.33.29257Abstract
The importance of DCs (digital competences) at all levels of education is evident, given the extensive literature, international legislation, projects, and pedagogical resources emerging and developing over the past decade. Therefore, DC frameworks for different types of educational contexts have been proposed. For example, DigCompEdu (“European Framework for the Digital Competence of Educators”, Punie & Redecker, 2017) has been widely accepted and adapted to different academic areas and geographical regions (e.g., in Spain, see Mora-Cantallops et al., 2022). According to these guidelines, DC formation in education includes various developmental sections and aspects (e.g., digital creation, online assessment, student empowerment, and so on), which teachers can check for self-reflection and critical thinking. Given the criteria established, different levels of expertise can be inferred according to competence variables, and, based on these, educators can work towards improving one aspect or another in the DC spectrum.
Nonetheless, despite this established framework of digital skills in education, there is a need for more contrastive analyses of actual DC developments in cross-disciplinary and cross-curricular ecologies: How current pedagogical approaches may vary within an exponentially growing digital world is, in fact, a key issue deserving further scholarly attention at various research dissemination levels. [1] A fair question, then, to ask is whether the post-pandemic era is witnessing significant DC developments and changes across the curriculum, and if so, to what extent. Also, related to this concern, is the lingering question of how digitally competent educators and learners really are in formal and informal teaching/learning scenarios? Further, how may pedagogy-informed decisions be made and integrated into current policies, projects, and planning in an era where technology should have become so familiar that it is invisible (cf. Bax, 2003)?
During the pandemic, an increased use of digital resources was seen, leading pedagogy experts to focus on educational policies and programmes for DC integration in curricula across geographical areas (e.g., Ganimian et al., 2020; McGarr et al., 2021; Selfie for teachers, 2022; Arcón & Monje, this special issue). This implementation of digital practices, often attempting to quell rising anxiety and fears related to decreased educational levels due to COVID, resulted in both successful and failed scenarios for learning, whereas it could also contribute to the ever-increasing digital divide between regions and social classes / groups (e.g., see Gómez Trigueros & Yáñez, 2021; Castelo Branco et al., 2022; Viscarret et al., 2022). As a result, a re-consideration of DCs, their definition, and description for curriculum design, are manifestly important nowadays. A recent case is the need for regulating and framing GenAI resources and practices in all types of academic / educational environments, entailing a (re)formulation of DC mechanics, objectives, purposes, and implementation (e.g., see Dwivedi et al., 2023; Fleckenstein et al., 2024; Lan & Chen, 2024).
[1] Despite an increase in pedagogy-focused investigations, the reality is that a wide gap still exists between researchers’ reflections and the teaching community’s actual practices, as observed in different meta-analyses (e.g., Sato & Lowen, 2022; Boulton & Vyatkina, 2024).
Downloads
Published
How to Cite
-
Abstract58
-
PDF114
-
HTML13
-
ePUB30
Issue
Section
License
Copyright (c) 2024 Alejandro Curado Fuentes, Mercedes Rico García
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
Authors who publish with this journal agree to the following terms:
- The Universitat de València is the editor of Research in Education and Learning Innovation Archives (REALIA) and retains the copyright of all that is published in the journal, while it allows and favours reuse under a copyleft license.
- The originals published in this journal are – unless otherwise specified – under a Creative Commons License: Attribution-NonComercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0).
Research in Education and Learning Innovation Archives (REALIA) encourages authors to disseminate and give visibility to their research published in this journal. For this, REALIA wishes to inform that:
- Authors retain copyright and grant the journal right of first publication.
- The work is simultaneously licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution License: Attribution-NonComercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0).
- Self-archive: Authors are permitted and encouraged to post their work online (e.g. in institutional repositories or on their website) to promote greater visibility and citation, with an acknowledgement of its first publication in this journal.