What digital skills do higher education leaders need? (Part 1)

?Thursday 17th June 2021,?the European Association of Institutions in Higher Education EURASHE?has organized a virtual meeting when members of the focus group on digitalization (I am delighted to be part of) shared their experience on the missing?digital skills?and the?digital transformation roadmap?in the sector.?

Results of the survey conducted on 27 May-9 June 2021 clearly show the needed digital skills summarized below to which I’ll be adding some perspectives.

?1/ The use of data to support strategic decisions (70% of responses).?

?Data is crucial for any sector and gives incredibly demographic and behavioral information about different audiences we want to reach.?

Moreover, data?analysis can save higher education, as mentioned in the provocative title of the joint assessment released by the?Association for Institutional Research,?EDUCAUSE, and the?National Association of College and University Business Officers.

?In the full report you can download?here, leaders of the three organizations, which together represent 2,500 colleges and universities, admit that:?? using data to understand better students and operations paves the way to developing new, innovative approaches for improved student recruiting and better outcomes and greater institutional efficiency?

Data and information are strategic institutional assets and continue to be a gold mine for many businesses around the globe.?That's why, instead of storing a vast amount of data, higher education should use it to drive better decision-making as for example identifying at risk-students and using the system to getting them back on track.

?2. Need for Interaction, communication, and collaboration through digital technologies (68%).?

?With more people working remotely worldwide, virtual communication and collaboration increased via social platforms. It becames the norm to operate at personal, professional, and/or institutional levels.?

According?to?Forbes, there are at least ten (10) ways that technology has changed how we work, communicate and collaborate.

New communication technologies don't only allow higher education leaders to connect, they also help students communicate and interact with their teachers and faculty members.?

In addition, the use of mobile devices considerably increased with 65.9% of the global population who are unique Internet phone users (according to Hootsuite and We are social last report).

With that in mind, We still need more analytics-based research to examine the effects of mobile devices and social networks on interpersonal communication and collaborative learning in academia.

3· Being able to Identify needs and resolve conceptual digital problems (55%).

??The crisis has tested the leadership skills of higher education decision-makers in an unprecedented way, forcing them to take fast and vital decisions.?

The priority remains to protect the health of the university community, deliver virtual and hybrid learning experiences to students and maintain business continuity in complex and uncertain conditions.

Communication, problem-solving, and critical thinking are some of the most needed?skills?to navigate this monumental shift, especially with the rise of automation.

?Many can benefit from digital skills at all levels of an organization regardless of its sector of activity to reduce the gap between digital and economic inequality that aren’t theoretical notions anymore.?

4·?keep up-to-date with the latest technological and digital developments and being aware of digital technologies for social well-being and social inclusion (55%).

According to?the World Economic Forum, "technologies that define the fourth industrial revolution include artificial intelligence, machine learning, robotics, data science, Cloud computing, and the Internet of Things (IoT)".

The previous list remains incomplete without educational technology?that is changing our relationship to both information and knowledge.

The good news is the promise these emerging technologies would drive us into the future and open endless opportunities, especially at a professional and business level.?

?The hard side is the fact they are growing exponentially, that it becomes difficult to keep up with each progress in the sector.?

Digital technologies?have raised fundamental questions about what we should do with these systems, how can we use these technologies for goods, what risks they involve, and how can we measure their impact on society?

5· Locate, retrieve, store and organize digital data, information, and content (52%).

The size of the indexed Web is phenomenally?reaching about 54 billion web pages in July 2021, making it hard to judge the relevance and credibility of digital content and sometimes differentiate between information and?misinformation (46% of responses).

The Web has added a new dimension to our activities of information retrieval and access to knowledge.?A large part of this knowledge, rarely available beyond the library walls centuries ago is one click away on the internet.

?However, the web content is heterogeneous, including academic content like digital databases or peer-reviewed journals and extensive electronic resources like?open access journals, wikis, blogs, and social media content.

?Acquiring information skills aligns with The American Libraries Association's efforts to spread?information literacy?in the higher education sector, which can help academia recognize when information is needed and select, locate, evaluate, and use the required information effectively.?

??6. Turning data into knowledge and copyright issues (36%)??

Protecting personal data and privacy?remain a big issue in the digital era (34% of responses)

In addition, extracting in-depth knowledge from data paves the way for proposing robust mechanisms for protecting data and securing information technology networks.

Even though technological developments have served as catalysts for the growth of analytics in higher education, universities use only a small percentage of the data they store to show historical trends rather than predictive analytics to assess current or future needs in the sector.

?More than 200 million students worldwide have been affected by universities and campuses' partial or total closures due to COVID 19 pandemic. So,?it becomes a priority for higher education to rethink how universities could better use data and analytics as a long-term commitment to drive student achievement and align information technology (IT) efforts with business processes and organizational goals for years to come.

In case you missed it Part 2 of the same article is available for access here

?