Ready to teach faculty for educational technology? Teaching counselling for technology enhanced teaching in higher education

Current professional development approaches at universities disregard faculty’s professional learning characteristics and fail to prepare academic staff adequately for technology enhanced teaching. Research on faculty engagement agrees upon the consensus that technology driven educational innovations are doomed to fail if teachers’ needs, interests, beliefs are not considered. Faculty support is often unrelated to familiar teaching routines and do not fit in with faculty’s own perceptions of their domain and discipline. Especially, new paradigms and practices of learning and instruction like student-centred and collaborative learning indicate new patterns of teaching and learning which are based on the development of faculty readiness for purposeful change. But research and practice neglect faculty as learning professionals at their learning-centered workplace in offering standardised qualification programs for technology enhanced teaching. The intended educational innovations can be brought in harmony with the teachers’ ideas if we know how to (further) develop teachers’ knowledge, skills and attitudes for technology enhanced teaching and if we can support a faculty centred approach which indicates the academic workplace as a learning environment for improvement and innovation in teaching. A major conclusion from studies on faculty engagement is that an understanding of individual and organisational characteristics influencing teaching competence is useful to rebuild and improve professional development and to make technology driven educational innovations more successful. Taking into account the new demands for faculty developers, this paper analyses different professional development approaches dependent on faculty’s requirements. The purpose of this study is to understand the development or change of teachers’ professional growth for technology enhanced teaching in relation to offered counselling by faculty developers. Therefore, expert interviews were conducted with experienced faculty developers at several universities. First results indicate the importance of different professional development approaches at the diverse individual professional growth stages and specific approaches for different disciplines.