The pandemic of Covid-19 made the digital transformation of higher education inevitable. Digital transformation is not a new practice: corporations and firms used it long before the pandemic. However, social distancing enhanced the necessity of universities to turn the education mode into distance learning, involving video meetings, conferences through different platforms, and communication via e-mail. The Covid-19 pandemic demonstrated that online learning is different from emergency online teaching. Challenges, which workers in the field of education faced in emergency online teaching during the pandemic, can be transformed into opportunities to be used in online learning (Adedoyin and Soykan, 2020). Therefore, workers in the field of education should define challenges to online learning and address them.
It turned out that students and universities themselves were not ready to switch to remote learning mode. Inequality of students’ socio-economic status, unequal access to technology, and heavy workloads on institutions’ ICT units are all challenges of emergency remote teaching (Adedoyin and Soykan, 2020). Marks Et al (2021) conducted numerous surveys, interviews, case studies, and observations and revealed a lack of digital transformation competency in the market. Moreover, data structure and processing are the core challenges to digital transformation in post-pandemic education (Marks Et al, 2021, Adedoyin and Soykan, 2020). Consequently, digital competence requires specific skills and knowledge that are needed in the usage of ICT and other digital platforms and devices to “perform responsibilities, such as problem solving, information management, collaboration with respect to effectiveness, efficiency and ethics” (Adedoyin and Soykan, 2020, p. 5). Therefore, workers in educational field are highly recommended to improve data structure, processing and increase the average digital competency level to address digitalization issues in online learning.
Reference List
Adedoyin, O. B., & Soykan, E. (2020). Covid-19 pandemic and online learning: the challenges and opportunities. Interactive Learning Environments, 1-13.
Marks, A., Maytha, A. A., Attasi, R., Elkishk, A. A., & Rezgui, Y. (2021). Digital transformation in higher education: maturity and challenges post COVID-19. In International Conference on Information Technology & Systems (pp. 53-70). Springer, Cham.