Strengthening teacher digital competence in higher education through micro-courses: a systematic literature review
Sandra-Inés Trujillo-Juárez, Ricardo Chaparro Sánchez, Adelina Morita-Alexander, Alexandro Escudero-Nahón, Alexandra Delgado-González
Abstract
This research aims to conduct a systematic and rigorous review of published articles on how the diagnosis and the design of micro-courses can enhance teachers’ digital competence in universities and higher education institutions. The objective is to synthesize existing evidence on training strategies for Teacher Digital Competence in higher education, assessing the effectiveness of micro-courses as flexible and contextualized means to strengthen areas of digital competence with lower proficiency levels. The systematic review was carried out following the PRISMA guidelines to ensure objectivity, systematization, and replicability. Additionally, the checklist proposed by Gisbert and Bonfill was employed. The search focused on the terms teacher digital competence, higher education, teacher training school, and micro-courses, as well as their synonymous variations in Spanish and English, within research articles indexed in ScienceDirect, ERIC, Google Scholar, Dialnet, Redalyc, and SciELO, published between 2017 and 2025. The analysis of the articles that met the inclusion and exclusion criteria revealed that, although there is a considerable amount of research related to teacher digital competence, a more specific search significantly reduced the number of relevant texts. From an initial total of 206 selected articles, 17 were ultimately evaluated and synthesized, as they also met the key criteria for assessing the risk of bias. As a result, a bibliographic matrix derived from the data extraction, a thematic analysis, and a qualitative synthesis of the reviewed studies are presented, as well as their practical applications and future research directions, aiming to provide an integrated perspective on research conducted in this field.