Abstract
Broad societal disruptions (i.e., the industrial revolution, digitalisation, and globalisation) have created a need for an increasingly adaptive higher education system in recent decades. However, the response to these disruptions by universities has generally been slow. Most recently, online learning environments have had to be leveraged by universities to overcome the difficulties in teaching and learning due to COVID-19 restrictions. Thus, universities have had to explore and adopt all potential digital learning opportunities that are able to keep students and teachers engaged in a short period. This paper proposes a digital learning HeXie ecology model, which conceptualises elements and relationships pertaining to the societal need for a more agile and digitally resilient higher education system that is better placed to confront disruptive events (such as pandemics) and that is able to produce graduates who are well-equipped to deal with disruption and uncertainty more broadly. Specifically, we propose a digital learning ecology that emphasises the role of self-directed learning and its dynamic interaction between formal, informal, and lifelong learning across a five-level ecosystem: the microsystem, mesosystem, exosystem, macrosystem, and chronosystem. This study contributes to the theoretical literature related to flexible learning ecologies by adopting and incorporating the Chinese HeXie concept into such ecologies.
Highlights
Building on the Fourth Industrial Revolution [1], Globalization 4.0 [2] has provided opportunities for industry and education to enhance their connections and collaboration, allowing higher education institutions to reconsider their business models, learning environments, technologies, and pedagogies in the process [3,4]
This paper focuses on the critical role of self-directed learning and digital resilience where both teachers and students are key stakeholders as the co-creators of the digital learning ecology across the microsystem, mesosystem, exosystem, macrosystem, and chronosystem
Our study contributes to the emerging literature on digital learning ecology [43,119] by providing a holistic view that across five ecosystems, while prior studies have made significant contributions in exploring the learning ecology within specific ecosystem
Summary
Building on the Fourth Industrial Revolution [1], Globalization 4.0 [2] has provided opportunities for industry and education to enhance their connections and collaboration, allowing higher education institutions to reconsider their business models, learning environments, technologies, and pedagogies in the process [3,4]. Most universities have, until recently, been rather cautious about the continuous disruptions (e.g., new learning technologies, rapidly changing market demands, and political rules) and potential educational transformations [5,6]. This situation changed dramatically in 2020 through the enforced impact of COVID-19. Next-generation digital learning environments have been proposed by educational technology practitioners to create a transformational shift in how universities design their learning ecosystems for students and teachers to have higher levels of digital resilience [16]. The boundaries and the constraints would need to be significantly blurred and become much more porous so that continuous exchanges and dynamic interactions between universities and their societal contexts become possible
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