Evolutionary change of higher education driven by digitalization

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Evolutionary change of higher education
driven by digitalization 
Ulrike Baumöl 
University of Hagen 
Chair of Information Management 
Hagen, Germany 
Alina Bockshecker 
University of Hagen 
Chair of Information Management 
Hagen, Germany 
Changes in higher education are not only technology-driven 
but even more by societal changes. As generation Y and Z enter 
the universities, other requirements have to be met, because their 
learning expectations differ from requirements of former 
generations. Many scientists highlight the effectivity of new 
teaching methods especially for higher education. The question is 
if positive effects are noticeable for the students and the lecturer 
when a course is restructured. The following article investigates 
the triggers and requirements and also shows possible structural 
elements for redesigning a course. The obtained positive effects 
could be an encouragement for other professors and lecturers to 
rethink their traditional course structures to increase the 
motivation of students. 
Keywords— Redesign of traditional course structures, higher 
education, trigger for changes, generations Y and Z, flipped 
classroom, structural elements of courses 
I.
INTRODUCTION 
Changes in society change the educational system – 
and since we face fundamental changes in our society, we can 
expect changes to our educational system to the same degree. 
This may not happen in the next few years, but will eventually 
happen over time. Some of these changes have already taken 
place; on the one hand, e.g., by abolishing the obligation to 
attend courses and on the other hand in the form of massive 
open online courses (MOOCs). Drivers are manifold and 
despite the, at the moment, ever-present discussion around the 
term “digitalization”, they are not only technology-based, but 
also lie in the changing value system and life-style of people. 
Although it is difficult to objectively prove, certain 
observations can be made. There are two main drivers that also 
influence changes in the way teaching and learning processes 
are shaped. The first driver is the so called sharing paradigm. It 
manifests itself as sharing economy in different parts of the 
society, as people share e.g. their homes, cars, and knowledge. 
The second driver is also behavior-induced and bases on 
mobility, flexibility, and collaboration. These two drivers seem 
to also inflict the observable changes in the behavior of 
younger generations. It can be concluded, that due to this, the 
so called Generation Y, but even more so Generation Z, also 
have changing requirements with respect to the way they learn 
[1, 2, 3, 4]. 
II.
DESIGN
BASE 
Before the paper takes a closer look at a field test and its 
structure, the term learning environment is defined. The term is 
often used to describe the surrounding in which learning takes 
place without clearly specifying the aspects that actually form 
the learning environment. The learning environment is 
influenced by the individual learning behavior and depending 
on institutional, physical and technological characteristics. 
The connection between the individual student learning 
behavior and the learning environment is twofold: Firstly, the 
environment is partly formed by the individual, because the 
way in which content is learnt is very individual [5]. For 
example, some people learn more efficient by looking at 
visualized content, others prefer the constant repetition of the 
topics using written notes. Additionally, the ability of people to 
learn content, which can be retained and transferred into 
knowledge, is limited [6]. There are even more individual traits 
influencing the learning environment such as the motivation, 
but these will not be further discussed for this paper. Secondly, 
the environment influences the individual learning behavior 
through its set-up, which is depicted by the other three 
characteristics. 
The second characteristic forming the learning environment 
is the institution, where content is provided for the students. In 
the field test the institution is the university. The set-up of the 
institution itself influences the learning environment. In 
addition, indirect effects, which result due to cultural and 
country specifics, manifest themselves in different ideas of 
knowledge creation at different universities over the globe. The 
Chinese university education system, for example, was 
previously focused on teaching the students a larger amount of 
content compared to the German system. In contrast to this, the 
German curriculum is based on a smaller amount of 
information, but students are asked to critically and reflectively 
think about the content, to use a wide variety of methods and to 
accomplish team work [7,8]. This example makes clear, that 
university as an institution is also characterized by many 
different external factors, which influence the learning 
environment. 
The physical learning place is the location where learning 
takes place. In a university context the first thing that comes 
978-1-5386-3968-9/17/$31.00 ©2017 IEEE

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into mind are lecture halls. The lecturer could influence the set-
up of the lecture halls to a certain degree, but the possibilities 
to redesign the hall are of course limited due to institutional, 
architectural, and financial restrictions. On the one hand, in 
virtual classrooms the lecturer has fewer possibilities to 
influence the set-up of the environment. On the other hand 
students may have the opportunity to participate in designing 
the virtual classroom. Learning content can be provided using 
different platforms having the characteristic that they support 
the students´ preference to prepare the topics independent of 
location and time. Short videos presenting the content, for 
example, offer to study in any situation and anywhere. The 
learning environment is no longer restricted to a physical room 
as for example the lecture halls but the content can be learnt in 
every situation of life [9, 10].
The fourth component of the learning environment is the 
technology. Digitalization is often directly associated with the 
development and the increasing adoption of technology in 
everyday life. Although technology is an important factor, 
societal changes also have impact on the students´ learning 
process. Technology changes in the university context mainly 
refer to the used media. Here it is necessary to distinguish 
between media which provide information and those which 
induce knowledge transfer. In the university context so called 
course management systems belong to the first group of media, 
providing all relevant information about a course. Knowledge 
inducing media provide content to the students. In this paper 
we differentiate between presence platform, virtual platform, 
and videos. Presence platform here combines all elements of 
the traditional university course structure based on lectures, 
seminars and face-to-face teamwork. In contrast to this, virtual 
platforms stand for “cyber-spaces based on [information and 
communication technologies] (ITC)” [11], which offer 24/7 
support and exchange of knowledge between students and 
students or students and the lecturer. Videos are often used to 
divide the content into small and coherent pieces available for 
learning not only in the actual lecture but whenever the 
students wish to learn, but can also cover a full lecture. 
The following figure 1 illustrates the twofold relationship 
of the learning environment and the individual learning 
behavior. Here it is worth mentioning, that different individual 
learning behaviors influence the instantiation of the learning 
environments. The bottom part of figure 1 presents the above 
described three possible entities of learning environments. 
After taking a closer look at the understanding of the term 
“learning environment”, the next paragraphs emphasize the 
requirements of the supply side of learning in a university 
context and the demand for a specific learning process 
influenced by changing perceptions of the Generations Y and Z 
now entering universities. The challenge is to coordinate the 
requirements on the demand side with the intentions on the 
supply side. On the demand side students require modules, 
which are attractive and support their successful studies. The 
counterpart, namely the supply side, is affected by lecturers and 
their use of didactic and pedagogical elements to create 
knowledge. Often, the basic driver of a course redesign is, that 
students belonging to the above mentioned Generation Y, or 
soon Z, want to contribute, be involved, collaborate and share 
knowledge as well as immerse in a flexible learning scenario 
[2, 12]. 
In this concrete case, the requirements of the demand side 
are influenced by the fact that the students are very busy due to 
their tight and sometimes rigid plan given by bachelor and 
master programs. In addition with the cost of the programs they 
often try to do as many as possible courses in parallel. This fact 
results in the constant quest of minimizing the presence in 
courses while gathering all the important information and 
meeting the requirements to pass the course. Their lifestyle also 
results in a low degree of concentration and attention which 
renders the structure of a “normal lecture” (e.g. input, 
discussion, reflection) difficult [2]. 
The supply side now faces the challenge on the one hand to 
still provide the input which is not trivial and requires a certain 
attention and focus to be understood. However, especially in 
tertiary education, it is still important to create a theoretical and 
conceptual basis to build upon for further learning and 
understanding the mechanisms behind a certain subject. On the 
other hand, the challenge is to adapt to the requirements of the 
demand side, otherwise facing the danger of losing the 
attention and motivation of the students.
Figure 2 illustrates the design base of university courses 
covering the requirements of the supply and the demand side of 
learning environments. 
III.
SET
UP
OF
LEARNING
ENVIRONMENT 
The above mentioned reasons lead to the decision to change 
the set-up of one course. The traditional course structure is 
shortly described below before the problems are tackled 
implementing a redesign of the course. The requirements from 
the teaching perspective were providing the input for a higher 
education course worth three ECTS (90 h workload), enabling 
virtual and physical team- and casework, organizing the exam 
Fig. 1.
Learning environment

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corresponding to the course and giving feedback with respect 
to the contribution during the course and the results. The new 
structure is required to also address these elements.