Digital Didactics: Development of Teaching Staff

by Dr. Jan F. Deinum, Gerard Baars, Sylvia Walserie-Wolff

All over the world, universities are implementing information and communication technology (ICT) to improve teaching. New ways of teaching with ICT are developed. Teachers need to know which ICT functionality can be used to improve their teaching. However, many teacher trainers lack experience using ICT and above all they lack ideas how to use ICT in their education.
Fortunately within Higher Education a lot of material and experience is available in the field of digital education. Pioneering teachers have experience with online teaching and much of their practices. The problem is, these experiences are mostly not available for others.
Therefore three universities in the Netherlands started the project Digital Didactics. The goal of this project is to stimulate and expand the use of ICT&E in Higher Education. The project is based upon the following propositions:
• teachers prefer to learn and to receive support ‘just in time’;
• teachers prefer to learn at their own speed and in their own surroundings;
• teachers prefer to learn from practices that are used already by colleague teachers;
• the Web is the medium to give information just in time and to facilitate learning.
In the project good practices, instruments and learning material referring to digital didactics are collected and described for the web in according to a format. Each idea is valued by a editorial staff of experts on ICT and education, so the quality of the ideas is guaranteed.
In September 2003 this site is evaluated and the users (teachers and educational consultants) are questioned with questionnaires and interviews about how they use the site, value good practices and what they need in their daily practice. These evaluation results will be presented in this paper. We have 1100 members of the site and each week more then 1200 visitors.

164 Short Paper

Date: 14 September 2004

Time: 16:00 pm

Location: Newman Lecture Theatre F

Theme: Pedagogy and the social implications of the new forms of communication