Ideas and Implementation of an Internet-Based System of Qualification for Teachers in a Federally Structured Education System: Using the Example of Economic Education Online (Germany)

Making an internet-based system of qualification available for teachers at general education schools within a federally organised education system poses a variety of challenges. Based on findings of pedagogical professional research, further and advanced teacher training needs to impart specialist scientific competencies and (simultaneously connected with these competencies) subject-didactic ones as well as providing support for curricular implementation on the one hand. On the other hand, there needs to be a broad portfolio of modules leading to specialist and didactic qualifications which can take heterogeneous curricular requirements into account. On the basis of pedagogical as well as systematic requirements, the article formulates the essential cornerstones of such a qualification-based online training system, using the example of the Economic (General) Education. Subsequent attention turns to a specific project with whose help more than 2500 teachers in eleven German federal states have gained qualifications since 2002. The focus is centred, in this regard, on the question of how the aforementioned objectives were pursued, aided by determining and developing numerous variant and invariant learning objects as well as linking them via a specific metadata system. This is followed by the presentation of further existing needs in research and development.