A Systematic Literature Review on Digital Transformation in Higher Education: Revealing Key Success Factors

Abstract

To answer the challenges and take advantage of opportunities in this digital era, digital transformation (DT) is carried out in various fields, including higher education. Although DT does not yet have an agreed-upon definition, several papers provide approaches to understanding it. This paper presents a systematic literature review (SLR) to understand DT in higher education by addressing the research questions of what, why, and how to conduct DT in higher education. Sixty-six papers from five digital libraries, namely IEEE Xplore, Scopus, Web of Science, SpringerLink, and ScienceDirect, are discussed in this paper. The results of the SLR reveal that in higher education, the success of DT is strongly influenced by the leadership of executive in managing the institution to overcome barriers, to adopt appropriate strategies, and to maintain a consistent approach to implementation.

Frameworks and Models for Digital Transformation in Engineering Education: A Literature Review Using a Systematic Approach

“…It indicates that while digital pedagogies have been introduced for decades, the research focusing on fundamental changes brought by digital technology in higher engineering education has only been reported in recent years. This is confirmed by prior systematic review studies on DT within the higher education field, where the earliest papers included are reported in the year 2016 [22] and 2018 [23], respectively. The number of articles in this study reaches its peak in 2021, during the COVID-19 pandemic (n = 6).…”

“…Discourses on marketization, applicability, functionalism, interdisciplinarity, employability, problemsolving, etc., are quite strong in the engineering field, with some of these exemplified in the focus on versions of industry (3.0, 4.0, and now 5.0). Therefore, the underlying drivers of DT in engineering education may be distinct from those in other fields of higher education [23]. It is thus recommended that greater emphasis be placed on basic pedagogical values and their entanglement with technology to influence DT in engineering education to promote learning processes.…”

“…As a result, 32 articles were removed, reducing the number of studies in the remaining sample to 21. To ensure that no relevant published studies were missed in the electronic search, following Booth et al's [25] suggestion, additional manual searches were conducted by checking the reference lists of the selected sources and five systematic reviews related to DT [2,22,23,29,30] and searching key journals and conference papers in the engineering education field. The former method resulted in three additional articles, while the latter strategy yielded nine.…”

“…The "why" of the frameworks was explored through these categories. We followed Bisri et al's [23] recommendations and deductively coded and categorized the drivers of DT in each article into one of three categories: learning process, society, and organization. Through this process, market emerged inductively as a further driver.…”

“…Previous reviews of DT literature have discussed the definition of DT, the state of DT in relation to higher education broadly, and the roles of various stakeholders in DT within the broader field of higher education in general [22,23]. However, there has been no review or analysis of holistic, transformative frameworks of DT in engineering education specifically, nor has there been an analysis of the complex entanglements of digital technology, pedagogy, and the drivers of DT.…”