Digitalisation is leading to a change in cooperation. Initial conditions are changing rapidly in all sectors, also in Europe. How can we reach the target groups of education? Which formats are sustainable and also economically feasible? Which developments can we consciously address? Teachers and learners are currently gaining experience with the digital transformation of education on an almost daily basis. New media concepts such as CoP (Community of Practice), MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) or OER (Open Educational Resources) represent only a small selection of new forms of cooperation in the context of digitalisation. However, the idea of a digital transformation for knowledge cooperation, also with and between society, education and industry, is still not given enough attention and its importance is not understood (Köhler et al., 2019).
What is it about? Digital transformation can be seen as the ongoing process from the beginning of digitalisation to “full digitality”. The basis of the transformation is the digital infrastructure and digital technologies, whereby the process goes hand in hand with the digital transformation and, in addition to industrialisation 4.0, also refers to an overall societal development towards society formation 5.0 (Blossfeld et al., 2018). For teachers, this means that they have to network with each other and that the use of digital media leads to increased cooperation (Seufert, 2018). With regard to digital competences, a basic distinction can be made between two requirement situations:
- shaping the digital transformation of one’s own profession and
- the co-design of the digital transformation of the entire organisation
The digital transformation in the school context can be represented in a stage model.
In the context of the digital transformation, will schools be more strongly or newly networked with society? Cress et al. (2018) describes that currently schools can hardly keep up with the high speed of digitalisation. Rather, schools must be enabled to become active shapers of the transformation themselves.