The Future Is Now: Coping With the Digital Paradigm in Higher Education

Introduction

Society has been hit by the digital revolution, affecting how we behave and interact, but also, and most importantly, how we absorb the world around us. We cannot imagine our lives without technology anymore, and this fact alone impacts how we teach and how we learn overwhelmingly. Higher Education Institutions (HEI) have long detected the need to adapt to this distinct approach, a new ecosystem that requires profound changes, from teaching and learning, to cultural, processual and technical adjustments.

HEIs, like other organizations in the world, are no longer isolated agents and are forced to excel in their managerial, administrative and technical expertise, as accelerated changes in the macro social environment demand swift transformation at a micro institutional level. This causes a great deal of pressure on HEIs, having to respond timely to the global needs of its customers, while thriving to continuously (re)think and (re)shape the future. To many HEIs, this means a global structural change, while, to others, the transition to a digital environment has already been established at several levels: management, information systems, learning practices, organizational culture, academic entrepreneurship, skills’ acquisition, or alliances with external technological stakeholders (Hashim et al., 2021; Sigalês, 2021).

This new educational concept model, however, is a hostage to how well HEIs players can master digital capabilities, since the efficient use of technology is mainly dependent on two modern survival skills: information literacy and digital literacy. There is no clear-cut evidence that university students are digitally literate, posing new challenges to the qualifications of graduates. The same applies to educators, who are required to adopt and adapt to new technologies and methodologies (Mamaeva et al., 2020). In this context, the dichotomy between humans and technology has become a touchstone and a major concern of managers and decision-makers. Education is, at its heart, a social process, thus raising the unavoidable reflection on how to balance both in the digital transformation paradigm (Garcez et al., 2021; Hashim et al., 2021; Sigalês, 2021).

At the same time, the existence of new drivers in education brings alternative mechanisms for HEIs to maintain competitive advantage, with interesting entrepreneurial opportunities. Thus, the more HEIs move to digital, the more they need to prepare and reimagine how to face this challenge. Success in this scenario demands trial and error, adjustments and readjustments, in an environment that seems to constantly promote innovation, reorganizing how we think and act. Buzzwords like big data, Internet of Things (IoT), cyber security or Artificial Intelligence (AI) became part of everyday vocabulary. Digital transformation in education is, in fact, a game-changer in physical and philosophical ways, which aim is to generate a fully-connected learning environment (Hashim et al., 2021; Mamaeva et al., 2020).

These are some of the reasons why HEIs are continuously being called to action, predicting change and not only reacting to it, enhancing their leadership and innovation capacities, and developing adequate formulas to operate in the marketplace. Their most important assignment is to create and manage learning and teaching contexts in effective and sustainable internal and external platforms, aligned with a global and groundbreaking mindset.

The purpose of this chapter is to understand which institutional strategies and practices the University of Aveiro (UA), in Portugal, is applying and planning to be executed having in mind the digital transformation framework. By taking note of the opinions of seven top-decision makers at the institution, this qualitative exploratory analysis will build on the interviewees’ experience to understand which institutional strategies and practices are being applied and which are planned to be executed at different levels shortly - managerial, pedagogical and scientific, technical, and societal - in an attempt to highlight institutional concerns, accomplishments, priorities and ambitions in the quest for an inclusive, technologically savvy educational strategy.

The remaining of the chapter is organized as follows: the second section addresses the background of digital transformation in HEIs; the third section describes the methodological context of the study; the fourth section presents the main findings and discusses them based on the interview topics posed to the participants; the final section concludes the study.