A qualitative comparison of competence frameworks for teacher educators’ digital competence

In order to properly prepare student teachers for the professional use of digital technologies, teacher educators at universities need to be digitally competent as well. However, different studies refer to different frameworks and thus definitions of digital competence, which makes comparison difficult. It is largely unclear how and where these different frameworks align, or whether they share a common core. In this paper, we report on a systematic literature search and qualitative content analysis aiming to identify corresponding frameworks for the digital competence of teacher educators. Ten national and international frameworks were analyzed and compared with the aim to assess their scope of competence targets, related requirement situations, and the overlap shared between frameworks. As a result, we identified 25 qualitatively distinct categories of digital competence targets, and five types of requirement situations. Most importantly, however, the analysis revealed that there exists minimal overlap between the ten frameworks. Implications for future research are discussed based on these findings.