Teaching Digital Competence Certification: a proposal for university teachers

Abstract

The certification of digital competence is an issue that has been explored for some years but nowadays it is becoming more important because the Digital Agenda for Europe raised it in the framework of the Europe 2020 Strategy (European Commission, 2014). In the case of teachers in general, and university teachers in particular, digital competence is key in the performance of their profession. There are a lot of studies that have been carried out and applied instruments in order to measure digital competence, all of which share the point of view of self-perception, but not of certification. This article reviews the initiatives and mechanisms that different organizations have developed in order to certify digital competence. This search is the result of the state of the art analysis in the context of a research work whose main purpose is to design a certification instrument of digital competence for university teachers. Different certification instruments are presented in this paper and their analysis leads to the finding that only two of them focus on the digital teaching competence, one of which is the instrument developed by the INTEF (2017a) and the other is the instrument developed in our research. Our instrument is the only one in our context to certify the digital competence of university teachers, taken into account the characteristics of this professional profile.