This article examines how online courses and webinars contribute to the development of biology teachers’ digital competence across pedagogical, technical, and subject-specific dimensions. Anchored in established frameworks (DigCompEdu, TPACK, SAMR) and the science-specific demands of biology education, the study conceptualizes digital competence as an integrated set of knowledge, skills, values, and reflective dispositions that enable teachers to design evidence-based learning with digital tools, orchestrate safe and ethical online practices, and evaluate learning outcomes with data-informed methods. The aim is to determine how instructor-led and self-paced online learning formats influence progression along competence levels from substitution to transformation, and how these formats interact with teachers’ prior experience, school ecology, and national curriculum expectations. Methodologically, the paper employs a mixed theoretical synthesis and analytic modeling of program structures commonly found in online professional development for science teachers, including MOOCs, micro-credentials, synchronous webinars, and coaching cycles. The discussion shows that online courses build systematic knowledge and offer reusable artifacts, while webinars catalyze just-in-time adaptation, community validation, and transfer to practice. The combination of asynchronous coursework and synchronous reflection emerges as a robust pathway to sustained change in lesson design, laboratory simulation, fieldwork digitization, formative analytics, and inclusive practices for diverse learners. The conclusion argues that the most effective initiatives are those that embed authentic biology tasks, iterative feedback, classroom trials, and public sharing of outcomes, thereby converting episodic training into durable professional identity growth.  

Digital competence, biology education, online courses

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