ABSTRACT
The HIS-Institute of Higher Education Development (HIS-HE) conducted a nationwide survey among Higher Education leaders about the extent to which the push for digitalization at German higher education institutions related to the COVID-19 pandemic has promoted strategic engagement with digitalization and how such experiences have been integrated into concepts for the future of teaching and learning. The findings show that the effects of the pandemic are most evident in the digitalization of teaching formats, while many infrastructural and technical developments had already been initiated before the pandemic and were at most accelerated. When the COVID-19-related developments of digitalization are analyzed with regard to structural characteristics of the HEIs represented in the sample, it becomes apparent that there are no fundamental differences between universities and universities of applied sciences. Only the universities of arts and music are distinguished by the fact that the pandemic-related changes are generally smaller and fewer innovations are to be expected after the pandemic. The range of disciplines of the HEIs also proves to be relevant when comparing HEIs with and without STEM subjects, as the former group shows a significantly greater dynamic of change. Last but not least, differences can also be found with regard to the existence of a digitalization strategy. Universities with a digitalization strategy not only have a head start in terms of experience, since they already offered online teaching or hybrid formats before the pandemic. Rather, they have changed their teaching and examination formats particularly extensively in the course of the pandemic and are planning to a greater extent to use instruments and formats for digital teaching in the future. © 2022, EasyChair. All rights reserved.
ABSTRACT
The development of the higher education system is the subject of a wide range of prognostic and exploratory studies that provide an outlook on potential future lines of development for the higher education sector. A dozen of those international future and foresight studies and trend reports on a future state of higher education covering a time corridor until about 2060 were identified and evaluated by means of literature research. However, the very dynamic change forced upon higher education institutions that all at once had to use digital technologies and to organise lessons exclusively online due to the COVID-19 pandemic since 2020 could not be anticipated in those foresight studies. It was therefore assumed that the future scenarios for higher education needed to be reassessed in light of the significant changes having occurred in higher education teaching due to the pandemic.To that end, a selection of international and national surveys on the impact of the pandemic on universities was used to operationalise the changes in higher education teaching in the course of the pandemic. Based on an overview of all the data material, a category-based contrastive analysis a) of a selection of foresight studies and b) of COVID-19-related surveys was carried out. Subsequently, the results of the respective analyses were confronted with each other and conclusions drawn which of the developments predicted in the foresight studies have become significantly more likely as a result of the pandemic-related transformation of teaching and learning emerging since 2020. The results should provide decision-makers in higher education and science policy, university management, deans’ offices, administrations or central institutions with a better understanding of potential medium- and long-term development trends in higher education teaching and learning. © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.