The Era of Digitalization in Education where do Universities 4.0 Go?

Abstract

Digitalization has revolutionized one of the most significant industries in the modern world, which is education. It has proven to be a successful and renowned strategy throughout the entire spectrum of the education industry. It has dissolved the distinction between physical and virtual distance and integrated more scientific methods for instructors to teach pupils. In order to select the most relevant studies in the digitalization field, bibliometric analysis was used, with the principal source of scientific articles selected being the academic platform Scopus. The content of 3836 research articles has been taken into consideration since 2019 and 2023. The search documents related to the “digitalization” issue are in title, abstract, and keywords. In order to highlight the structure of the scientific field, we used a content analysis, inspecting the most common words and the relationships between words. Additionally, a network of co-occurrences was taken into account. The analysis was performed using the WOSviever program. In the next part of the research, the term “digitalization” was examined in more detail. The Scopus search engine uses filters, including the terms “digitalization,” “higher,” and “education,” but is limited to key words. The content of 104 research articles has been taken into consideration since 2019 and 2023. The research results showed that the fields of technology, education, and management provide the theoretical basis for research on the digitalization of higher education. The findings also demonstrate the topic’s interdisciplinary character (as seen by publications published in several fields) and its strong relationship to concepts like online learning, digital transformation, and sustainable development. Based on the literature analysis, it can be concluded that University 4.0 will go to the smart fully digital University (University 5.0), will take care of aspects of sustainable development, and will develop teachers’ soft skills, especially emotional intelligence.