Exploring digitalisation and its impact on Higher Educational Institutes in a contemporary setting: A Study of the Higher Educational Institutes in Sri Lanka

Abstract

Globally, higher education institutions are increasingly digitising their operations. A bustling and expanding ecosystem of digital platforms in higher education includes online teaching and research, decision-making using learning and business analytics, and building "smart" campuses. Universities do not digitalise on their own but depend on proprietary digital platforms. This study focuses on how digitalisation impacts higher education institutes in Sri Lanka. This study used a methodology based on a qualitative survey, and the research used personal interviews to collect the required data. The research findings disclosed that although all stakeholders within the higher education institutes had to adapt to forced digitalisation, most were not ready to accept it as the main element defining current-day higher education. Higher education institutes, students, and teachers are the mainly affected parties in the forced digitalisation because of Covid-19. The main factors influencing these parties were inadequate digital literacy, poor financial capabilities, and lack of basic requirements for a digitalised learning environment. However, even with minimum resources, learning is underway in almost all higher education institutes, but it resulted in a digital divide, primarily impacting students and their learning abilities.