Abstract:

COVID-19 pandemic accelerated the widespread digital transformation of higher education focusing mainly on digital enablement and other technological capabilities, finding innovative solutions to personalize and improve education, also exposing the need to support remote education and advance digital higher education. This paper presents the real need for a strong sense of purpose, through these great times of disruption by reevaluating priorities and revealing what really matters, caring for each other, and higher education professionals must rethink overall strategies and prepare for an ecosystem in which higher education is no longer only delivered face to face. Therefore, disruptive technologies such as Augmented Reality (AR), Artificial Intelligence (AI), Internet of Things (IoT), Cloud Computing etc. are enabling open, supportive and trustful strategic collaborations within the Universities, while ensuring accessibility and accuracy of the educational process. Thereby, Universities have to collaborate, share policies and evaluate effectiveness while providing fast, secure, and cost-effective innovative performant educational solutions, reducing interactions prompting coronavirus exposure. Of great interest in the present paper is the analysis of the way in which Universities have to develop a virtual culture and disruptive technologies should be seen as academic opportunities to stay relevant in the digital era. Universities have to develop a digital forward mindset, improve data intelligence and provide scalable content positioning themselves on the digital maturity pillars, while understanding the digital student lifecycle and build empathy and digital authenticity.
Little research has been done on the nature of the digital academic opportunities rolled out by the pandemic, despite the considerable amount of space in between the information revealed by Universities in terms of evaluating their effectiveness so far and the decisions Universities actually take, considering the pandemic context, to improve their overall efficiency. Although some work has been done, further studies are needed to fill the identified research gaps, and the present paper is using a quantitative research allowing the exploration of the causal relationships between specific constructs. The present research aims to demonstrate why improving Universities’ awareness to embrace digital and acting accordingly is a way of staying relevant in the post-pandemic digital world, considering the constant pressure of redrafting the understanding of student digital needs, and hence the imperative to build greater trust among students in relation to the Universities’ digital maturity, on one hand, and to highlight how the provided solutions improve student lifecycle, while making their life effortless and secured, on the other hand. Universities must realize the necessity to develop a true digital culture enabled by disruptive technologies, observations from the research also prompting the formulation of hypotheses which could be tested in further piece of research, contributing to the new necessary knowledge on the path to the Next Normal.

Keywords:

Higher Education, Disruptive technologies, Digital Maturity, Digital Authenticity, COVID-19.