Digital Pedagogy and Curriculum Transformation in Higher Education: A Structured Review of Approaches, Benefits, and Challenges

Abstract

Digital technologies are increasingly reshaping higher education, yet their educational value depends less on technology adoption itself than on how technologies are integrated into curriculum and pedagogy. This structured review synthesises literature on digital pedagogical approaches, educational benefits, and implementation challenges to examine how digital pedagogy contributes to curriculum transformation in higher education. The review conceptualises digital pedagogy as a deliberate integration of digital technologies with learning outcomes, content, and assessment. Drawing on twenty-one included sources identified through a structured search, the review finds that the included sources report benefits of purposeful digital integration including flexibility, engagement, personalised learning, formative feedback, and the development of digital competence, and constraints including uneven digital competence, limited institutional support, digital inequality, and ethical and academic integrity concerns associated with artificial intelligence. Applying an operational definition of curriculum transformation to each source, however, the review finds that transformation is directly evidenced in very few of the twenty-one sources and is not assessable in the large majority, indicating that the available literature largely describes or theorises digital pedagogy rather than measuring whether curriculum-level change occurred. The review argues that digital curriculum transformation is best understood as a pedagogical and curricular process that technology supports, rather than a technological process that automatically produces educational change, and that it requires sustained alignment among learning outcomes, pedagogy, technology, assessment, teacher competence, and institutional conditions.