A tentative model for sustainable pedagogical digital competence development : Exploring networked learning in an educational development project

This paper addresses one large university initiative for educational development aimed at further developing educations and teacher competence with a focus on technology-enhanced and lifelong learning. The aim of the paper is to describe and problematize the design of an ongoing project for educational development, Higher Education and Digitalisation (HEaD). It focuses on identifying key components of an educational development project for technology enhanced learning as well as how such a project can be organized to sustain in regular university operations. The article discusses how a project for educational development can create over-time durable infrastructures, organization, policy and motivation for maintaining a continual educational development. In the first phase of the project, a model was developed for how competence development can be conducted sustainably. This model contains two perspectives: (1) an organizational perspective that focuses on the key partners to be involved; and (2) a process perspective that focuses on activities and aims in strategic competence development projects. The tentative model with its two perspectives is described and discussed in this article as a preliminary result. The model includes four identified key entities and their roles in pedagogical digital competence development; academic departments and their faculty, educational developers, infrastructure and IT-department and the pedagogical research unit. Further, a process model based on existing support structures, complemented with activities that can be sustained after the HEaD project ends is presented.HEa