This poster presents the design and development of a new continuing education program entitled Competence Development in Work with Children and Youth, aimed at professionals working with children and adolescents across Norway. The initiative responds to a national call for more flexible and decentralized education pathways, addressing the need for accessible, practice-oriented professional learning opportunities that can be pursued alongside full-time employment. By offering a fully digital, modular program, the project seeks to broaden participation in continuing education beyond traditional campus-based formats and reach professionals across diverse geographical and institutional contexts.

The central objective of the project is to design and pilot a flexible, research-informed continuing education model that supports professional competence development while allowing participants to remain embedded in their everyday work settings. The program targets a wide range of professionals, including those working in early childhood education, schools, child welfare services, health and social services, and community-based youth work. Rather than emphasizing credential accumulation alone, the program focuses on strengthening reflective practice, professional agency, and collaborative learning across disciplinary boundaries.

The overarching research questions guiding the project are:

1. How can a fully digital, flexible course design support meaningful learning and professional development for practitioners working with children and youth?
2. How are key orientations for creating a positive climate for diversity reflected in the pedagogical design and learning activities of the program?
3. How do participants experience the relationship between theory, reflection, and application in their own professional contexts?

The program is built on three core design principles. First, flexibility is ensured through asynchronous learning activities and modular course structures, allowing participants to organize their learning around their workday and personal responsibilities. Second, fully digital delivery enables genuine location independence, with all teaching, collaboration, and assessment taking place online via the Canvas learning platform. Third, collaborative learning is emphasized through small interdisciplinary learning groups, fostering peer exchange, shared reflection, and mutual professional support across sectors.

Pedagogically, the program adapts the U.S.-based ICMEE model (Viesca & Commins, 2026) to a Norwegian continuing education context. Each course module follows a structured five-step learning cycle: initial reflection, exploration, application (“Make it Work”), sharing, and final reflection. This cycle is designed to support participants in becoming aware of their own perspectives, engaging with research-based knowledge, applying insights in practice, and critically reflecting on changes in understanding over time.

The theoretical framework underpinning the project is the Model for Orientations to Create a Positive Climate for Diversity (Viesca et al., 2024). The model identifies five interrelated orientations—agency, interconnectedness, openness, curiosity, and creativity—which together contribute to inclusive and supportive learning environments. In this project, these orientations inform both the pedagogical design and the intended learning outcomes of the program. The poster will illustrate how the five orientations are embedded within the learning cycle and aligned with module assignments and assessment criteria.

The development of the program is supported by the university’s Learning Hub BLINK, a strategic initiative aimed at strengthening pedagogical innovation and supporting lecturers in the further development of their teaching. In this project, BLINK provides expertise and guidance specifically related to the flexibilization of teaching and learning, with the goal of reaching a broader and more diverse student body. This support has been central in shaping the program’s digital pedagogy, assessment design, and facilitation strategies, ensuring alignment with national priorities for accessible, decentralized, and high-quality continuing education.

The project adopts a qualitative, design-oriented research approach focusing on the development, implementation, and evaluation of a digital continuing education program. Data collection will take place throughout the first pilot phase, which includes two modules launching in spring 2026: Children and Youth’s Behavior, Communication, and Relationships and Project Development and Professional Role Understanding in Work with Children and Youth. Multiple data sources will be used to capture participants’ learning experiences and outcomes. First, continuous formative feedback will be collected through short reflective surveys embedded in the Canvas learning environment. These surveys invite participants to reflect on their engagement with course content, collaboration in learning groups, and perceived relevance to their professional practice. Second, participants’ written assignments and reflective submissions will be collected as primary data sources, providing insight into how learners integrate theoretical perspectives with practical experiences. Data analysis will be conducted using the Gioia methodology, an interpretive, grounded theory–inspired approach (Corbin & Strauss, 2008) that enables the integration of inductive insights and deductive structure through a rigorous yet flexible multi-stage coding process (Gioia et al., 2013). Both inductive and theoretically informed coding will be applied, allowing themes to emerge from the data while also examining how participants’ experiences reflect the five orientations of the diversity framework (Viesca et al., 2024). The five orientations—agency, interconnectedness, openness, curiosity, and creativity—will function as sensitizing concepts during analysis. Particular attention will be paid to how participants describe changes in perspective between the initial and final reflection stages of each topic. Ethical considerations include informed consent, anonymization of data, and secure data storage. The study focuses on professional learning experiences rather than personal or sensitive information about children or service users. The methodology aims to generate transferable insights into digital continuing education design.

The expected outcomes of this project relate both to educational design and to participants’ professional learning experiences. The poster will present preliminary insights from the design phase, including reflections on translating the ICMEE model into a fully digital Norwegian context and aligning pedagogical intentions with practical constraints faced by working professionals. It is anticipated that the five-step learning cycle will support deepened reflection and stronger connections between theory and practice. Initial findings are expected to show that repeated reflection—before and after engagement with content and practice—enhances participants’ awareness of their own assumptions, strengths, and professional development needs. Collaborative group work is expected to foster interconnectedness and mutual recognition across professional backgrounds, contributing to a positive learning climate. In relation to the theoretical framework, the project is expected to demonstrate how the five orientations for a positive climate for diversity can be operationalized within digital course design. The analysis will illustrate how agency is supported through practice-based assignments, openness and curiosity through dialogical reflection, and creativity and curiosity through flexible application tasks adapted to local contexts. More broadly, the project contributes to European discussions on lifelong learning, digitalization, and inclusive access to higher education. By documenting design principles, challenges, and emerging practices, the poster aims to offer a transferable model for institutions seeking to expand flexible, decentralized professional education. The role of the university facilitator will be highlighted as central to sustaining motivation, guiding reflection, and ensuring academic quality in fully digital professional learning environments.

Corbin, J., & Strauss, A. (2008). Basics of Qualitative Research: Techniques and Procedures for Developing Grounded Theory (3rd ed.). SAGE. Gioia, D. A., Corley, K. G., & Hamilton, A. L. (2013). Seeking Qualitative Rigor in Inductive Research: Notes on the Gioia Methodology. In Organizational Research Methods 16(1), 15–31. Viesca, K.M., & Commins, N.L. (2026). Humanizing Pedagogies with Multilingual Learners: Transforming Teaching in the Content Areas. Routledge.