In the context of accelerating digital transformation, digital competence has become a core requirement for higher education teachers, particularly for teacher educators responsible for preparing future teachers. European research has provided conceptual foundations for influential frameworks addressing teachers’ digital competence, such as TPACK and DigCompEdu. More recently, the HeDiCom framework has been proposed to capture the specific digital competence requirements of higher education teachers (Tondeur et al., 2023). Despite their widespread use in European contexts, qualitative evidence remains limited regarding how these conceptualisations are enacted in professional practice beyond Europe, particularly within policy-driven higher education systems. This study addresses this gap by adopting HeDiCom as an analytical lens to examine how teacher educators enact digital competence as professional practice in Vietnamese higher education. Digital competence is conceptualised not as a static set of individual skills but as a situated professional practice enacted through pedagogical judgement, decision-making, and action (Krumsvik, 2014; Uerz et al., 2018; Tondeur et al., 2023). This perspective is complemented by professional agency, defined as teacher educators’ capacity to enact HeDiCom competencies while navigating institutional expectations, policy demands, and material conditions.

The study builds on preliminary survey evidence indicating recurring challenges related to infrastructure, workload, and pedagogical integration among teacher educators across Vietnamese universities. However, these findings did not elucidate how teacher educators experience, interpret, and respond to such conditions in everyday practice. Accordingly, a qualitative, multi-site design centred on in-depth interviews was employed. Empirical data were collected through semi-structured interviews with fifteen teacher educators (five per institution) from three major Vietnamese universities of teacher education: Hanoi National University of Education, Ho Chi Minh City University of Education, and the University of Danang – University of Science and Education. These institutions were selected as analytically contrasting sites within a shared national policy framework for digital transformation, rather than for regional comparison. Participants were purposively selected to capture diversity in academic qualifications, length of professional service, teaching experience, and engagement with digital teaching. Interview questions were aligned with the four HeDiCom domains—teaching practice, empowering students for a digital society, teachers’ digital literacy, and teachers’ professional development—alongside prompts on professional agency and institutional conditions. Data were analysed using thematic analysis (Braun & Clarke, 2012), combining deductive coding informed by HeDiCom with inductive coding to identify emergent patterns of agency and constraint.

The findings indicate that teacher educators demonstrate awareness of the pedagogical potential of digital technologies and a sense of professional responsibility for developing students’ digital competence. However, the enactment of HeDiCom competencies is shaped by institutional conditions, including intensified workloads, limited time for professional learning, fragmented digital infrastructure, and ambiguous organisational expectations regarding digital innovation. Under these conditions, professional agency is frequently expressed in adaptive or compliance-oriented forms, with teacher educators selectively integrating digital technologies at a manageable level rather than engaging in more transformative practice. Digital competence thus emerges not as an individual skills deficit but as a negotiated professional practice embedded in everyday academic work.

By applying a European digital competence framework to a non-European higher education context, the study advances a practice-oriented understanding of digital competence and strengthens dialogue between European digital competence research and global higher education contexts. The findings also contribute to methodological discussions by demonstrating how a multi-site qualitative design can capture the interplay between policy, institutional conditions, and professional agency.

A qualitative case study methodology (Creswell, 2009) was employed to explore teacher educators’ professional practices, experiences, and interpretations of digital competence within their institutional contexts. The research was conducted across three major centres of teacher education in Vietnam—Hanoi, Ho Chi Minh City, and Da Nang—which operate within a shared national policy framework for digital transformation. These sites were selected as analytically contrasting institutional settings rather than for regional comparison, enabling the identification of recurring patterns across different organisational contexts. The qualitative case study design provided a context-sensitive approach to examining the professional meanings, judgements, and forms of agency that emerge in response to institutional conditions. Data were collected through semi-structured interviews with fifteen teacher educators from three universities: Hanoi National University of Education, Ho Chi Minh City University of Education, and the University of Danang – University of Science and Education. Five participants were purposively selected from each institution to ensure diversity in academic qualifications, length of professional service, teaching experience, and levels of engagement with digital teaching. The sample included early-, mid-, and senior-career teacher educators involved in undergraduate and postgraduate teacher education programmes. The interview protocol was explicitly aligned with the four domains of the HeDiCom framework (Tondeur et al., 2023)—teaching practice, empowering students for a digital society, teachers’ digital literacy, and teachers’ professional development—alongside prompts addressing professional agency and institutional conditions, including workload, professional learning opportunities, infrastructural support, and organisational expectations regarding digital innovation. Interviews were conducted in Vietnamese, audio-recorded with participants’ consent, and transcribed verbatim. Transcripts were analysed in Vietnamese to preserve meaning. Interview data were analysed using thematic analysis following Braun and Clarke (2012). Deductive coding was guided by the HeDiCom framework, while inductive coding captured emergent themes related to professional agency, constraints, and adaptive practices. ATLAS.ti (version 23) supported systematic coding, data organisation, and theme development, enhancing analytical rigour and transparency. To strengthen credibility, emergent themes were discussed with a subset of participants (member checking) and triangulated with survey findings from the preliminary exploratory phase. Ethical standards for qualitative research were strictly adhered to. Participation was voluntary, and informed consent was obtained from all participants. Confidentiality was ensured through anonymisation of transcripts and secure storage of research data. Participants were fully informed about the study’s aims and procedures and were free to withdraw from the research at any stage without consequences.

This study examined how teacher educators enact digital competence as professional practice in Vietnamese higher education during digital transformation, using the HeDiCom framework as an analytical lens. Drawing on qualitative interview data from three major universities of teacher education, the findings demonstrate that digital competence is not merely a matter of individual skills or technical proficiency but a situated and negotiated practice shaped by institutional contexts. Teacher educators generally recognise the pedagogical potential of digital technologies and express a strong sense of professional responsibility for supporting students’ development of digital competence. However, the enactment of HeDiCom competencies is consistently mediated by institutional and systemic conditions, including intensified workloads, limited opportunities for professional learning, fragmented digital infrastructure, and unclear organisational expectations regarding digital innovation. Under such constraints, professional agency tends to be exercised in adaptive or compliance-oriented ways, with teacher educators selectively integrating digital technologies at a manageable level rather than engaging in more transformative forms of practice. These findings reinforce a practice-oriented understanding of digital competence, highlighting that challenges in digital transformation cannot be reduced to deficits in individual capability alone. By applying a European digital competence framework to a non-European, policy-driven higher education context, this study makes two key contributions. First, it extends the empirical relevance of the HeDiCom framework beyond Europe, demonstrating its usefulness for analysing teacher educators’ professional practice across diverse institutional settings. Second, it foregrounds professional agency as a critical mediator between digital competence frameworks and their enactment in everyday teaching. The findings suggest that initiatives to strengthen teacher educators’ digital competence should move beyond skills-based training to address the organisational and structural conditions that enable sustainable and meaningful digital innovation in teacher education.

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