Higher Education 4.0: The Digital Transformation of Classroom Lectures to Blended Learning

This book chronicles a 10-year introduction of blended learning into the delivery at a leading technological university, with a longstanding tradition of technology-enabled teaching and learning, and state-of-the-art infrastructure. Hence, both teachers and students were familiar with the idea of online courses. Despite this, the longitudinal experiment did not proceed as expected. Though few technical problems, it required behavioural changes from teachers and learners, thus unearthing a host of socio-technical issues, challenges, and conundrums.

With the undercurrent of design ideals such as "tech for good", any industrial sector must examine whether digital platforms are credible substitutes or at best complementary. In this era of Industry 4.0, higher education, like any other industry, should not be about the creative destruction of what we value in universities, but their digital transformation. The book concludes with an agenda for large, repeatable Randomised Controlled Trials (RCTs) to validate digital platforms that could fulfil the aspirations of the key stakeholder groups - students, faculty, and regulators as well as delving into the role of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) as surrogates for "fees-free" higher education and whether the design of such a HiEd 4.0 platform is even a credible proposition.

Specifically, the book examines the data-driven evidence within a design-based research methodology to present outcomes of two alternative instructional designs evaluated - traditional lecturing and blended learning. Based on the research findings and statistical analysis, it concludes that the inexorable shift to online delivery of education must be guided by informed educational management and innovation.

Kevin Anthony Jones is Professor of computer science and currently a Research Fellow at the Center for Inclusive Digital Enterprise (CeIDE); he is also a Senior Fellow in Advance Higher Education, and based in Singapore. In this COVID-19 year, he was a Visiting Assistant Professor at Zayed University in Dubai. Prior to that, he served for over 17 years of experience as an academic at Nanyang Technological University. His discipline expertise is software system engineering and deployment, which he extends to his life-long passion of innovational learning and teaching in tertiary education. His most recent major experiments via the design-based research methodology enabled by new educational technology are core course: A) active (no lecturing) blended learning during 2007-2011, and B) flipped classroom during 2014-2018. In parallel since 2009, Kevin has been conducting ongoing research in serious games, MOOCs, and active-video-learning prototypes, with a view to incorporating them into full-time courses. In his spare time, he is completing an eBook on software system analysis and design, grounded in active-learning precepts

Ravishankar Sharma is currently Chair of the Information Systems Group at the University of Canterbury Business School (New Zealand) and Founding Director of the Centre for Inclusive Digital Enterprise - CeIDE. Prior to this, he was Visiting Professor of Information Systems at ESSEC Business School (Asia Pacific). He received the B.Sc. (Com. Sci., Math. & Econ.) from Brandon, M.Sc. (Com. Sci.) from Regina, and Ph.D. (Management Sciences) from Waterloo. He has held academic appointments for over two decades at NTU, St FX, and visiting appointments at the Institute of Technology Bandung, USC Marshall School, IIT Bombay, IMD, and the SP Jain School of Global Management. He has spent 10 years in industry as Asean Communications Industry Principal at IBM Global Services and Director of the Multimedia Competency Centre of Deutsche Telekom Asia. His teaching, consulting, and research interests are in knowledge and digital economic strategies; focused on digital transformations using data analytics and design thinking. He has also been involved in Singapore's Initiative for Asean Integration by training senior officials in Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, and Myanmar in Advanced IT Planning. He has successfully secured over $1m in grants as Principal Investigator of the NCB-funded S-ONE field trials, an NRF-funded project that calls itself the Special Interest Group on Interactive Digital Enterprises (SIGIDE) and an MoE tier 2 grant on digital literacies, knowledge societies, and sustainable development.