State-of-the-art in teachers’ online pedagogical competencies in higher education from 2011 to 2022

University teachers play an important role in teaching and learning activities in the online environment. However, the emerging remote education due to the COVID-19 pandemic has revealed the shortcomings of online teaching competencies of teachers. The bibliometric study investigated the knowledge base of online teacher pedagogical competencies in higher education by analyzing 131 Web of Science-indexed documents from 2011 to 2022. The findings revealed the sudden decline of the number announced in the two years 2021 and 2022. Spain, Russia, the United States, and Canada are emerging countries in the network of international collaboration. The research community is based on small research groups and has emerged in recent years. Sources focus on subjects such as education, e-learning, computer science, developmental and educational psychology, among which education sciences is the most prominent one in the last years. With nine identified themes, these of interest are online teacher roles, remote emergency teaching, online professional development, and online teaching in COVID-19. Emerging keywords highlighted potential topics in the foreseeable future such as competency frameworks, global education, and teaching professionalism.