Abstract:

The effect of COVID-19 has been devastating in the higher education sector, a sector that was previously immersed in a process of digital transformation and at risk of being disrupted due to new digital technologies. The total lockdown caused that, overnight, higher education institutions (HEIs) had to improvise urgent measures to try to continue maintaining educational activity in the forced distance, with a 67% of HEIs being able to replace classroom teaching by distance teaching and learning by overcoming the main obstacles, basically access to technical infrastructure, competences and pedagogies for distance learning, rising new concerns of risk of growing inequality for those that are left behind.

Our paper has the purpose to understand how main HEI’s stakeholders (students, teaching and research staff, administration and services personal, companies and society) and areas activity (students, teaching and research staff, administration and services personal, companies and society) were impacted during the first COVID-19’s wave, and how the situation was managed to keep operating.

The empirical evidence has been collected by employing a double case study of two HEIs with opposing profiles: case 1, a traditional, medium-to small-sized regional university, born non-digital, purposefully selected due to the potential high impact experienced by the forced digitization, and case 2, a pioneering born-digital HEI, medium-sized, private but partially state-funded, with an international community of 4,000 remote professors 75,000 students, specifically selected for its natural ability to operate in digital environments. Both cases were headquartered in Spain.

Results reveal that COVID-19 forced digitization effects have been uneven depending on the profile of the HEI, affecting all areas in the context of the traditional HEI and acting more as an acceleration-trigger, more internally focused in the context of the born digital HEI. In reaction to this, new potential future strategic priorities emerge, such as developing new semi-face-to-face or hybrid modalities, in the case of the traditional HEI, or the opportunity to become fully digital, in the case of the born-digital HEI.

Keywords:

Born digital, COVID-19, stakeholders, digital transformation, HEI.