The Digitalisation of Study Process from Perspective of Academics

Latvia and France’s Hubert Curien partnership programme ‘Osmoze’ is currently carrying out the cooperative research project “The gap between political development documents and practice of digitalisation of higher education” and the results of the project will be presented in this paper. The results reveal the competence of academics to carry out a study process that is relevant to the current trends in higher education (HE) digitalisation. A mixed research design was implemented to achieve the goal of the study. In the first stage of research, the authors identified three groups of documents for analysis: 1) laws, regulations and procedures governing HE in Latvia; 2) Latvian development and planning documents; and 3) legislative documents governing HE in Europe. An inductive approach for qualitative content analysis was implemented to determine what needs to be done by academics in the context of HE digitalisation. At the political level, academics should be able to use various ICT within the framework of the study process, implement blended learning, as well as create digital learning materials to help students acquire the competence needed for today's labour market. Based on the results of the qualitative content analysis, a questionnaire was prepared, and the target group of academics answered what knowledge, skills and attitudes should be combined in order to implement blended learning, and also evaluated the digitalisation aspects of their HE institutions. The data set was aggregated and combined with the skills that the academics have to possess, as defined in the normative documents, and a tangible model was created that reveals the competence of the academics both as determined at the political level and in practice to carry out the study process according to the digitalisation trends. Finally, recommendations were made for the digitalisation of the study process and to strengthen the competence of academics.