Digital Learning and the Reconfiguration of Teachers’ Professional Roles: A Critical Narrative Review of Pedagogy, Competence, Agency and Artificial Intelligence

Abstract

Digital learning has moved from a supplementary mode of educational delivery to a structural feature of contemporary schooling and higher education. This transition has renewed a recurrent question: whether digital technologies diminish the importance of teachers or redistribute and intensify professional expertise. This critical narrative review examines evidence published from 1 January 2000 to 19 June 2026, while retaining earlier foundational work where necessary, to analyse how teachers’ roles are being reconfigured across technology-enhanced, blended, online and artificial intelligence-mediated learning. Literature was identified through ERIC, OpenAlex, OpenAIRE, CORE, DOAJ and Semantic Scholar, supplemented by citation searching and authoritative institutional sources. The synthesis focuses on five interrelated changes: the movement from content delivery towards pedagogical mediation; the expansion of teacher knowledge from tool proficiency to integrated digital and artificial intelligence competence; the growing importance of learning design, facilitation and classroom orchestration; the emergence of data interpretation, artificial intelligence oversight and ethical stewardship as professional responsibilities; and the interaction of these changes with teacher identity, agency, workload and organisational conditions. Evidence is strongest in showing that educational benefits from technology depend on pedagogy, teacher preparation, purposeful interaction and contextual support rather than on the technology itself. Research on online teaching similarly indicates that teacher presence, communication, assessment and design remain central, although the balance among these functions changes. By contrast, claims that artificial intelligence will substitute for teachers are weakly supported: current evidence is dominated by conceptual work, early-stage adoption studies, competency instruments and short-term interventions. Digitalisation can augment professional judgement when teachers retain decision authority and receive time, training and institutional support, but it can also intensify work, narrow judgement through datafication and reproduce inequalities. The review argues that contemporary teacher professionalism is best understood as technologically mediated human judgement rather than technological replacement. Research priorities include performance-based competence measures, longitudinal studies of role change, causal evaluations of professional learning, cross-cultural evidence and governance models that preserve pedagogical agency while enabling responsible human–artificial intelligence collaboration.