Digital Transformation in Higher Education – New Cohorts, New Requirements?

Digital transformation refers to changes that digital technologies cause and that influence various aspects of human life. Previous researchers mainly focused on the impact of the digital transformation in the context of commercial organisations and business processes. In this study, we aim to examine how digital transformation affects universities and students. We examine differences and changes in the usage of collaboration and communication platforms between different groups of members at the university and within the university lifecycle. To gain new insights, a qualitative case study with semi-structured interviews was conducted. One of the main results shows that Bachelor and Master students prefer the usage of social network sites for collaboration and communication while Ph.D. students and employees do not. Even though an increasing number of modern platforms for direct communication is offered, the results show that the communication between the groups of students and employees still takes place via email

Demand for Cloud Services as an Infrastructure in Higher Education

Cloud computing is one of the major current trends in IS. It is said to be able to increase work productivity and simultaneously lower costs in organizations. However, institutions of higher education, like universities, remain hesitant to adopt it. The ‘NSA scandal’ and similar revelations lead to a sharp decline in trust (especially in Europe) in commercial cloud computing providers like Dropbox and Google. At the same time, cloud computing solutions often are not customized to students’ and employees’ needs. In this context, we examine the concept of ‘university cloud computing services’ by discussing it from the theoretical viewpoint as an ‘infrastructure.’ We conducted a large-scale survey with over 10,000 student respondents and employees from three universities. Our findings indicate a high demand for cloud computing at those universities and offer valuable implications for designing and managing cloud computing in a higher educational context