The digitalization of universities from a students’ perspective

Abstract

The digitalization of higher education institutions is progressing significantly. Though the use of digital assets enhances the students’ learning experience and offers new opportunities for administration, there are no uniform standards for the use of digital media in teaching and student services. As educational service providers, universities are dependent on students being able to cope with the structures offered. Thus it is essential to ascertain students’ attitudes of the technologies used. We asked students from three blended learning courses about their perceptions. We further asked the students what should be done and by whom. Our results show that students see structural changes occurring not only in themselves but also at the level of the university management. Our research contributes to the actual discussion about the digitalization of higher education by offering suggestions for development from a students’ view. The results are valuable for lecturers and faculty managers who want to advance the digitalization of services and learning.

Comparing Pre- and Intra-Covid-19 students’ perception of the digitalization of higher education institutions

“…Students recognize the efforts made during the pandemic. (Brink, Packmohr, & Vogelsang, 2020) for exact wordings of the items.…”

“…To measure the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic and associated constraints, we collected data at two different time points. The pre-pandemic data collection was conducted to analyze the general view of students on the digitalization of their HEIs (Brink, Packmohr, & Vogelsang, 2020). An intra-pandemic data collection was added with the same instrument in the same courses to compare results.…”

Digitainability—Digital Competences Post-COVID-19 for a Sustainable Society

“…The benefits of digitalization for sustainable development are undeniable, and only those countries and systems that fully embrace an education that fosters digital competences will equip their citizens with the competences needed for them to thrive and succeed both in the personal and professional spheres. [60] (p. 4525) However, the school is, in institutional terms, a conservative industry, which hampers its necessary transformation [14,98]; within a school culture, there are shared ways of thinking, feeling and acting that shape common expectations [190]. It is, in most cases, a traditionalist institution [86].…”

“…Digital education, of which smart education was exposed as an illustration, entails, on the part of the teacher-and in comparison with traditional education-flexibility in the short-and medium-term planning of the learning activities to develop [98] permanent coordination [90] and the implementation of active methods [191,197] in the promotion of active learning [14]. That is to say, following Domingo-Coscollola et al [191], it is critical that the teacher has methodological digital competence.…”

“…We live in societies in which digitalization processes are present everywhere, which is translated, for example, into a large number of individuals becoming interconnected in the virtual online world of the Internet through social networks and the research of information of any type. These processes tend to increasingly shape the knowledge we attain in its various modalities [14][15][16][17][18].…”