Abstract—In an era of digital transformation, technology has
a strong influence on educational organizations. It is a huge
challenge for teachers to deal with digital technology. A
professional learning community platform integrated with
technology is a powerful tool that can improve the digital
competency of teachers to manage that challenge. The purpose
of this research is to 1) develop a virtual professional learning
community platform (VPLC platform) based on an experiential
design thinking process, 2) to develop a training course for
building digital teacher competency using an experiential
design thinking process, and 3) to assess the digital competency
of teachers using the VPLC platform in conjunction with the
experiential design thinking process. Thirty teachers were
selected by multi-stage sampling. The architectures used were
the VPLC platform, the experiential design thinking process,
and digital teacher competency. The research instrument was a
digital competency assessment form for teachers with regard to
the VPLC platform and an experiential design thinking process
to enhance digital teacher competency. The findings revealed
that 1) the VPLC platform model consisted of three components:
1) the VPLC platform, 2) the experiential design thinking
process, and 3) digital teacher competency, brought together in
four modules: 1) User management module, 2) Content
management module, 3) Learner management module, and 4)
Analytics management module and five processes: 1)
Empathize the Concrete experience, 2) Define the Problem and
Reflective observation, 3) Ideate the Abstract conceptualization,
4) Prototype, and 5) Test and Evolution and Active
experimentation. The overall result of the quality of a training
course in building digital teacher competency with an
experiential design thinking process was at the highest quality
value (Mean= 4.90, S.D.= 0.31). 3) The overall resulting digital
competency of teachers was at the highest level (Mean= 4.80,
S.D.= 0.40).
Index Terms—Design thinking, digital teacher competency,
experiential learning, virtual professional learning community
(VPLC).
Surasak Srisawat and Panita Wannapiroon are with King Mongkut's
University of Technology North Bangkok, Thailand (e-mail:
surasaks.sawat@gmail.com).
Cite: Surasak Srisawat and Panita Wannapiroon, "The Development of Virtual Professional Learning Community Platform with Experiential Design Thinking Process to Enhance Digital Teacher Competency," International Journal of Information and Education Technology vol. 12, no. 12, pp. 1291-1299, 2022.
Copyright © 2022 by the authors. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited (CC BY 4.0).