The Future Educator Skills in the Digitization Era: Effects of Technological Development on Higher Education

Abstract

Rapid technological development has affected teaching and teachers' work environment in higher education in many ways. Technology allows us to learn anytime, anywhere we want, but are the educators ready and what kind of skills they need to match the changing world. This paper aims to propose points to consider while planning support programs, internal training for higher education teachers in order to help them provide high quality teaching. The main focus is in the direct and indirect effects of digitization. Not all the proposed skills are a necessity in each and every context, instead a higher education institution could use the results of this study to check whether this is something that should be taken seriously in their context. As higher education institutions increasingly offer online courses, teachers' skills have to be up to date, since those skills can be easily globally verified.