ENHANCING DIGITAL TEACHING SKILLS IN HIGHER EDUCATION: USING PEDAGOGY OVER TECHNOLOGY IN PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT

The Enhancing Digital Capacity in Teaching and Learning in Irish Universities project, funded by the Higher Education Authority in Ireland, aims to enhance the digital teaching and learning skills of those who teach in Irish universities. Building on the existing professional development activities already in place in the participating universities, the project aims to increase the impact and range of these activities by emphasising pedagogy, activating student partnerships and engaging staff in discipline and programme groupings to achieve meaningful and sustainable change. The pilot phase of this three year project ran from June to December 2019. This phase provided an opportunity for staff who provide professional development supports to reflect on current digital competences, participate in a community of practice to avail of consultation, support and training and to trial improvements to existing professional development activities for roll out beyond the pilot phase. This paper reports on the pilot activities at Trinity College Dublin, where a five ECTS credit module, Technology Enhanced Learning in Higher Education, was redeveloped using a partnership between academic staff and learning technologists to focus on the flipped classroom approach. This partnership facilitated a rebalancing in favour of pedagogy over technology and aimed to lay a pathway to implementation by modelling a flipped classroom approach and using applied materials, learning activities and one-to-one consultancies. The overall project adopted the Digital Competencies Framework for Educators: DigCompEdu [1] as a common and integrating framework for pilot activities. This paper also reports on the experiences of the Trinity College Dublin team in mapping the redeveloped module to the DigCompEdu framework.