The digitization of higher education has triggered a “digital disruption” in concepts, models, teaching, learning, methods, environments, and organizational management, driving universities toward becoming “digital universities.” The COVID-19 pandemic has further accelerated the process of digitizing higher education.
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What is the digitization transformation of education?
In the context of digital development, the purpose of the digitization transformation of education is to cultivate qualified citizens, transformational leaders, and innovative pioneers for the digital era. They must possess digital ethics, scientific foundations, learning abilities, and innovative skills.
In terms of content, digitization transformation is a comprehensive transformation of all elements. It involves not only adding a few digital technology courses but also effectively teaching and learning digital literacy. To achieve this, it is necessary to construct a teaching system that incorporates digital thinking, methods, and skills(sources from usms.ac.ma).
In terms of means, it is essential to widely and effectively use digital tools, especially intelligent tools, for teaching and learning, management, evaluation, and services. This allows both teachers and students to immerse themselves in a digital environment and ecosystem, engaging in learning by doing.
Digitization transformation aims to build new models of digital teaching and learning, including:
A digitized campus combining the real and virtual.
Smart classrooms and facilities
Digitized teaching programs combining general and professional aspects.
Digitized training processes combining standardization and personalization.
Digital learning models combine theory and practice, imparting and creating, and involving both teachers and students.
In summary, digitization transformation represents a historic, comprehensive, and profound change in the educational paradigm.
Elements of digitizing higher education:
Concept and culture of digitized higher education: Digitization in education is an inevitable result of the deep integration of human information technology and educational teaching. It brings about a transformation in the concepts, qualities, capabilities, and methods of the education system and educators.
This accelerates the evolution and deepening of thinking, educational planning, teaching methods, work practices, and educational culture toward digitization. In the future, the digitized concepts, environments, cultures, and orientations in higher education will become crucial guiding factors for the high-quality development of modern higher education.
Digitized higher education should adhere to the “student-centered” education philosophy and use digital technology to promote the modernization of higher education governance systems and governance capabilities.
Resources and infrastructure of digitized higher education:
The content of services provided by digitized higher education relies on various digital teaching resources, including digital teaching materials, software and hardware tools, and resource repositories.
The infrastructure of digitized higher education includes various digital devices, networks, terminals, software and hardware platforms, systems, places, tools, software, data, resources, institutions, and mechanisms that support public education and school teaching. It provides the fundamental platform and environment for the operation of digitized higher education resources and content. The level, quality, and capabilities of digitized higher education services are largely determined by digitized resources and infrastructure, supporting the efficient and smooth operation of various higher education institutions and their teaching activities.
The main construction mode of digitized higher education resources and infrastructure is the collaborative and cooperative development of government, industry, academia, and research. The future development trends include networking, intelligence, service-oriented, and comprehensive digitization.
Digitized Content and Medium in Higher Education:
Digitized content in higher education involves courses, textbooks, experiments, projects, reference materials, etc., and constitutes the core elements of digitization in higher education. Utilizing digital technology to construct education content in new forms, diverse modes, and high-quality digitized content that meets the requirements of higher education is essential.
Simultaneously, the construction of carriers for digitized educational content, such as multimedia courseware, massive open online courses (MOOCs), virtual simulation experimental courses, instructional videos, digital textbooks, and online teaching materials, plays a crucial role in the digitization of education. In the future, there will be comprehensive carriers for digitized higher education content in the metaverse environment, crossing the boundaries between the real and virtual worlds, including digital twins, digital natives, and virtual-real interaction. Achieving a deep integration of digitized teaching content and carriers is an optimization goal in the construction of digitized higher education teaching.
Digitized Platforms and Tools in Higher Education:
Digitization in education inevitably brings about changes in the forms, modes, forms, and methods of teaching and learning, which require support from various digitized educational platforms and tools. Digitized platforms and tools in higher education not only support educational activities but also provide comprehensive support for teaching management.
For example, networked online education platforms digitized intelligent teaching and learning tools, have provided strong support for large-scale online education teaching and efficient learning in smart campus environments. These tools have played a significant role in online teaching during the COVID-19 pandemic in the last two years.
Digitized intelligent teaching and learning tools and online education platforms will directly impact the thinking and concepts, resources and content, models and methods, behaviors and activities, standards and norms, and management and evaluation of digitized higher education.
Standards and Norms in Digitized Higher Education:
Standards and norms are essential for the development and widespread application of digitized higher education. They constrain data information, teaching behaviors, and hardware and software facilities, serving as fundamental agreements for various digital systems in education to operate interoperably.
Standards and norms provide openness, sharing, connectivity, and reusability for digitized education systems, facilitating convenient and efficient communication and collaborative integration within and outside digitized education systems.
Standards and norms in digitized higher education cover multiple series, including hardware and software devices, instruments, technology, data, resource content, business, applications, services, quality, and safety regulations, forming a comprehensive system of standards and norms in digitized higher education(quotes from usms).
Evaluation and Certification in Digitized Higher Education:
Evaluation and certification in digitized higher education should reflect the combination of form and content, results and processes, qualitative and quantitative aspects, conditions, and capabilities. It involves various aspects such as information infrastructure for digitization, information business support, education data and resources, teaching and research, management business applications, system integration, and sharing levels, system performance and security, and service quality and guarantee systems.
Leveraging technologies such as big data and artificial intelligence to establish a scientifically rational, fair, multidimensional evaluation method and certification system can guide the standardized, healthy, and high-quality development of digitized higher education.
Skills and Abilities in Digitized Higher Education Personnel:
The development, use, and management of digitized education rely on various personnel as the main actors. The overall skills and abilities of personnel related to higher education digitization are crucial in determining the level and quality of digitized higher education development in the country.
Information literacy refers to the basic abilities people should possess in adapting to the information age, including cultural literacy, information awareness, and information skills. Digital literacy can be seen as the ability to use digital resources and effectively participate in the digitization process in the new generation of information technology environments.
Management and Policies in Digitized Higher Education:
Digitized higher education policies involve digitization in the education industry, digitalization of school business management, teaching input and activities, teachers, and students, among other aspects.
Digitized higher education management involves the construction of smart campuses, support for teaching processes and teaching management, and personnel, finance, and asset management, among other aspects.
Empowering the education system comprehensively through digital technology, promoting the overall and continuous reform of education and teaching, and reengineering education management business processes to enhance the development vitality of the education system and the governance and service capabilities of schools are the fundamental goals of digitized higher education management.
The above key elements are closely interconnected and complementary, requiring systematic integration and cooperation to actively contribute to the progress of digitized higher education
