‘It opened a new teaching space for me’: Transforming higher education practice through digital education

Abstract

In-service teachers' professional development (PD) courses on digital education tend to be based on a restrictive idea of ‘knowledge transfer’ presupposing an application of course content into practice through a top-down and linear approach. In this paper, we adopt a broader conceptual perspective to examine the learning outcomes of an online/hybrid PD course developed through a design-based research project between 2020 and 2023 and attended by 98 participants from four Higher Education institutions in Denmark. We draw on the cultural-historical activity theory concepts of ‘recontextualisation’ and ‘construction/instantiation’ of the object of activity to analyse interviews with course participants (n = 15). The main findings reveal how the teachers engaged with the resources they encountered in the course to reshape their teaching practices by personalising these resources and adapting them to situated concerns. We identified three types of resources (knowledge, tools, and networks) that the teachers recontextualised to achieve transformation of their practices. This transformation happened in two ways: by reconstructing and remediating problem spaces in teaching, and by bringing about concrete solutions to both existing and newly formulated challenges. In this process, peer feedback and collective discussions were essential elements of the teachers' learning process. In conclusion we discuss the broader relevance of our findings for designing and evaluating online and hybrid digital education PD courses.