Barriers and Strategies for Teachers' Use of Digital Educational Platforms

The results of using digital educational platforms depend on teachers: the barriers they face and strategies for overcoming them. In the qualitative study conducted using semi-structured interviews, a range of teachers’ opinions was collected about what difficulties exist in using the platforms, the goals that teachers set for themselves and their behavior patterns. A sample of 15 teachers was segmented by using either MES (Moscow) or SberClass (other constituent entities of the Russian Federation), teaching in middle or high school, and having at least 1 year of experience using the platform. The study is based on the author's theoretical framework regarding barriers to platform use and a published study by the Academy of the Ministry of Education jointly with Moscow State Pedagogical University in 2022, proposing a new classification of teachers' strategies. The results showed an increase in the complexity of the barriers teachers encounter in the process of digital transformation of the school. Behavior strategies may change in the presence of unresolved difficulties that teachers themselves are not able to solve. Thus, teachers noted emerging organizational barriers that are most difficult to overcome, due to which their attitude towards the use of platforms and, in principle, the introduction of innovations, changes. The results of the study can be useful both for school administrative teams for making management decisions and for developers of digital educational platforms for designing CJM.