Methodological Approaches to Academic Staff Development via Digital Resources

Abstract

Since 2024, Ukraine's occupational standard for higher education teachers has formally listed professional development among academic staff's core labour functions, reflecting a wider shift in which digitalisation is turning internet resources into a leading instrument of distance, blended, and flipped learning. Existing scholarship substantiates several methodological approaches to this process but typically treats them in isolation, leaving academic staff development via digital resources without a systematised foundation. This article addresses that gap. The purpose is to characterise methodological approaches (acmeological, competency-based, innovation-project, integrative, information-communication, and practice-oriented) and to justify their combined application as an interrelated foundation for organising academic staff development through digital resources. The study is theoretical: it draws on the analysis and synthesis of Ukrainian pedagogical literature and the 2024 occupational standard, applying conceptual-terminological and comparative methods to a source base of fourteen items published between 2010 and 2025. The findings show each approach addresses a distinct facet of growth: acmeological orients staff towards mastery; competency-based shifts emphasis to applying knowledge; innovation-project channels growth into concrete outcomes; integrative unites formal, non-formal, and informal learning; information-communication builds the digital literacy on which the others depend; practice-oriented anchors development in real problems. Digital resources emerge as the shared infrastructure that makes each approach realisable at scale. The article concludes that professional development via digital resources is most fully grounded when these approaches are applied jointly, offering a coherent methodological framework for university management and staff-development practitioners. Directions for further research include empirical validation of these methodological approaches among practising staff and comparative studies across universities of different types and size.