Digital communication and collaboration among teachers – a comparative analysis of instant messaging and videoconferencing

Digital communication has played an increasingly important role in schools around the world, especially since the COVID-19 pandemic. For professional communication and collaboration in particular, digital tools have provided teachers with the opportunity to collaborate location-independently and to easily exchange information and teaching materials. Hence, this study aimed to explore how teachers communicate and collaborate digitally by examining differences in the use of instant messaging and videoconferencing and the attitudes of teachers towards these technologies. Therefore, an online survey was conducted with primary and secondary school teachers from Germany (N = 250, 72.0% female). The analysis showed that messengers were used significantly more than videoconferences and that they differed in their usefulness for occasions of communication and collaboration. Structural equation modeling indicated that the self-assessed digital communication competence of teachers is both a significant predictor for the behavioral intention to use messengers as well as videoconferences, although the behavioral intention to use messengers in the future was significantly higher than for videoconferences. While a higher threshold to use videoconferences might be a reason for the differences that were identified in this study, further research into the communication and collaboration among teachers is still needed to understand the reasons for the differences in use.