The Digital Transformation of European Higher Education: Technological, Ecological, and Social Challenges

In the last twenty years, higher education institutions have undergone a series of waves of reform, driven by the need to adapt traditional organisational models to radical changes in global and local contexts, characterised by a loss of borders, turbulence, instability, a progressive lack of resources and epochal challenges. Within a triple polarity system, driven on one side by supranational regulatory pressures, on another by the rapidly obsolescent labour market and on the third side by a three-pointed transition (digital, ecological and social), universities are at the centre of complex processes of change that increasingly characterise them as complex organisations. The project was designed to help universities develop strategic approaches to digital transformation. It provided multiple case studies aimed at exploring Digital Technologies in HE: from the European vision to the university governance; a training pilot test for improving Online teaching in HE and the Engagement tools for HE online learning environment; the sharing of the Symbiotic Learning Paradigm (SLP): Teacher Competences, Methods & Approaches in HE and Recommendation and guidelines for Academic Bodies. The most important outcomes of the ERASMUS + ECOLHE project summarised in this volume explore the complex process of building an EHEA through a theoretical, empirical and multilevel comparative perspective. Its main goal is to reconstruct both the interpretation between the supranational and local dimensions, and the space of action that is always open, and never completely overdetermined, between the subjective action activated by a person's “responsible freedom” and the influence exercised by social structures on courses of action. ECOLHE was a three-year Erasmus+ co-funded project launched in September 2020, as a partnership between the Digital Technologies, Education & Society Research Centre, Link Campus University Foundation (as Applicant), Roma Tre University (Italy), University College Cork (Ireland), Universitat Obert de Catalunya (Spain), University of Patras (Greece), Laurea University of Applied Sciences (Finland), European Association Erasmus Coordinator (Cypro).