eCoaches with a Focus on Supporting Individualized and Flexible Teaching
Starting in spring semester 2026, PHBern will train eCoaches to support lecturers in designing digitally supported self-organised learning (SOL) courses.
Duration: January 2025 – December 2025
Status: Completed
Educational Level: Tertiary Level
Topic: Digital Skills & Literacy
Keywords: SOL, eCoaches, Digital Skills
Initial Situation
In the course of digital transformation, Self-Organised Learning (SOL) has gained significant importance in teaching — particularly within virtual learning environments. Lecturers face the challenge of designing and implementing SOL courses in a way that supports learning effectively. To support them in this task, PHBern will train students as eCoaches during the spring semester of 2026. These eCoaches will be empowered to competently advise and support lecturers in the design and implementation of digitally supported learning processes from a media-didactic perspective. Building on the proven concept developed by the University of Bern, the eCoach programme will be adapted to the specific needs of PHBern. Against this background, the content revision of the eCoach training aims to advance teaching and learning with digital media by providing didactic support to lecturers in the development and implementation of SOL units. Within the scope of a Booster Project, the existing programme was already assessed for its transferability to PHBern and BFH.
Previous Project
In the previous project eCoaches of the Bernese Universities, a joint, cross-institutional eCoach programme was developed to promote innovative digital teaching and to train eCoaches as multipliers.
Objectives
PHBern is adapting the tried-and-tested eCoach programme to its specific institutional context and expanding it with media-didactic content tailored to the development of digitally supported SOL courses. The core focus of the BeLEARN project is (1) the systematic identification of the competencies required for eCoaches to effectively support lecturers. This competency profile serves as the starting point for (2) the development of the eCoach training programme at PHBern.
Method
The starting point for developing this competency profile is the project “SOLIAS” — a DigiLeB initiative that segments learning opportunities into didactically designed digital units and implements them for self-organised learning in PHBern’s Learning Management System. Based on practical implementations and project experiences, DigiLeB systematically consolidates the specific competencies that prospective eCoaches require and translates them into a clearly structured competency framework. This framework forms the basis for eCoach training at PHBern.
Results
The project
- systematically identified the skills that eCoaches need in order to effectively guide and support lecturers in the creation of SOL courses. This resulted in a competency profile for prospective eCoaches.
- developed a coordinated training programme based on the identified competency profile.
Implemented Translation
The project is based on the valuable experience gained by the University of Bern with the eCoaches programme. Building on this, PHBern is providing additional media education input tailored to its specific requirements, such as the design of digitally supported SOL courses. These developments are shared with the cooperating universities (BFH and University of Bern), which can adopt and further develop them. This creates a lively transfer of knowledge that drives the eCoaches programme forward. The results obtained form the basis for an eCoaches programme designed to support lecturers in creating SOL courses. The competence profile and training programme can be adopted by other universities and further developed to suit their specific contexts.
