Abstract:

The COVID-19 pandemic initiated an extensive, sudden, and dramatic digital transformation in society. Such a dramatic transformation in all spheres of life may not have given room for much resistance or inertia to emerge.

Digital transformation, i.e., “a process that aims to improve an entity by triggering significant changes to its properties through combinations of information, computing, communication, and connectivity technologies” (Vial, 2019: 118). Nevertheless, they extensively relied on digital technologies to transform their offerings and, along the way, tried to deal with and manage various structural and cultural changes and barriers (cf. e.g., Vial, 2019). Existing resources and capabilities, including factors such as technology, culture, practices, people’s skills, competencies, and values, attitudes, identities, and mindsets, have been considered barriers to digital transformation (Vial, 2019).

The pandemic forced us to take an extraordinary digital leap in our everyday life and practices, including our students and their education. In a flash, their education was transformed from traditional classroom practice to a remote, digitalized one.

The paper uses normalization process theory (NPT) to examine current thinking and approaches and offering some guidelines to inform research and practice (NettaIivari et al., 2020). NPT can be used to support the work of implementation and evaluation of complex interventions. The NPT recognizes that individuals have an important role in contributing to activities that influence the potential for a new practice to become normalized and its underlying components of cohesion, cognitive participation, collective action, and reflexive monitoring. As an exemplar, we focus on the changing nature of work and the adoption of remote working practices. We are particularly interested in the digital transformation pushed forward by the COVID-19 pandemic concerning higher education students. In this study, we examine the digital transformation initiated by the COVID-19 pandemic in Higher education, the variety of digital divides emerging and reinforced, and the possible barriers reported along the way. The study took place in a polytechnic university school with a sample of 700 students out of a universe of 6200 students. Our data does not indicate a lot of inertia and resistance towards this transformation in both students and teachers.

Keywords:

Digital Transformation, NPT, higher education, digital communication.