Hörmann, Corinna: The Journey of Digital Education in Austria: From Non-Existent to Mandatory in Five Years. Dissertation, Johannes Kepler Universität Linz, 2023

online: https://epub.jku.at/obvulihs/content/titleinfo/8704505

The concept of life-long learning has become progressively crucial over the last few decades. As part of this development, the European Digital Competence Framework for the Digital Competence of Educators (DigCompEdu), a scientifically sound framework, responds to the need that every European citizen should gain the necessary competencies for enhancing and using digital technologies in a critical, innovative, and creative way. As long ago as 1985, Austria introduced the subject „Computer Science“ in grade 9 in grammar school. For quite a long time, there was solely this one year of mandatory IT education during school career. When Austria implemented the mandatory curriculum „Digital Education“ (Digitale Grundbildung) in September 2018 for all students in lower secondary education, 21st century skills finally found their formal way into additional grades. School administration could determine if they offer „Digital Education“ as a stand-alone subject or if they implement the curriculum in an integrative way in several other subjects. Finally, in the school year 2022/23, „Digital Education“ was installed as a compulsory subject in regular Austrian timetables. This doctoral thesis reports on the journey of digital education in the Austrian school system – from the beginning with solely computer science topics to a stand-alone subject covering digital competencies, media competencies, and civic education. The underlying study was planned as a trend study, where three cross-sectional studies were undertaken (pilot study, COVID study, and main study). The pilot study with 117 participants from Upper Austria concentrated on implementing the new curriculum and wanted to explore the research topic. At the beginning of 2020, the research process was disturbed by the COVID-19 pandemic, as it took much work to gather information from schools or teachers. Therefore another survey was launched that concentrated on implementing the curriculum „Digital Education“ during the ERT phase at the time of the SARS-COVID-19 pandemic in Austria – 121 teachers were willing to complete this questionnaire. The main study focused on the implementation of the mandatory curriculum „Digital Education“, which was installed in Austria in September 2022. The underlying survey was distributed to all Austrian secondary public schools to teachers who teach „Digital Education“ in the school year 2022/23. A total of 795 participants agreed to begin the questionnaire, whereas 673 managed to finish it. Each underlying survey was conducted as an Internet-based questionnaire, where e-mails were sent out directly to appropriate schools with the invitation for teachers to participate. This process, of course, reduced the time to distribute, gather, and process data. Moreover, the anonymity and non-traceability of participants were ensured. As it was impossible to reach Austria's whole teacher population, all surveys relied upon voluntary sampling. Results show that in the first phase of the curriculum, many schools needed more teachers and teaching hours to install an additional subject. This then resulted in uncertainty in which subjects and how this new content should be implemented. With the curriculum reform in 2022, studies reveal that teachers prefer the stand-alone subject over the integrated version.