Digital Transformation and the Future of Higher Education: A Comprehensive Umbrella Review

Abstract

Digital transformation (DT) is fundamentally changing the higher education institutions (HEIs) around the globe. The COVID-19 pandemic has drastically increased using digitally enabled approaches for teaching, learning, research, and administration, driven by the convergence of technologies encompassing the industry 4.0. Despite the various existing reviews that tackle digital transformation separately, some, such as those on the technology adoption or strategic planning, or pedagogical innovation, have limited scope and do not offer an overall, multi-dimensional synthesis. This rather comprehensive umbrella review combines dimensions, technologies, strategic processes and actors related to the implementation of DT in HEIs, based on the systematic and multivocal literature reviews, analyses via PRISMA, and thematic synthesises of articles, published from 2015 to 2024, in Scopus, Web of Science, IEEE Xplore, ScienceDirect, Springer Link and ACM Digital Library databases. A total of 47 studies in the analytical corpus, two of which were anchor reviews and 43 were complementary primary studies, were identified in an initial pool of 312 records. The findings showed that most digital transformation projects (DTIs) in the education sector are concentrated on competitive education (24%) and that the dominant enabling technologies are analytics (23%), cloud computing (20%), and artificial intelligence (16%). Most of all, just one-quarter of HEIs can speak with any degree of fluency about a digital strategy and only 56% of DTIs are part of a broader institutional agenda. The review concludes that, based on the importance of those topics in the curriculum, student demand satisfaction (12%) and digital culture (9%) fall short of expected levels of investment. The results are derived from the existing reviews and primary studies and thus share the limitations of the primary literature reviewed. The results highlight the need for university leaders to create digital strategies that are integrated, invest in faculty development and digital culture, and embrace a transformative approach instead of a technology-only approach to the implementation of digital transformation.