Digitalization as a Strategic Goal-The Missed Potential of Profiling Danish Universities in the Digitalization Era?

Abstract

Digitalization has been a very powerful policy idea, impacting the policies in higher education in the Nordic countries for years, and due to the Covid-19 pandemic the focus on digitalization of (higher) education has increased significantly. Even before the Covid-19 pandemic, the Nordic countries and Denmark in particular have had a very high uptake of ICT-solutions. At the same time as these digital transformations have been reshaping the way that we think about higher education, the higher education systems and institutions have also been reshaped. Over the past decades, the pressures on universities have become increasingly intense, and change has become the order of the day for higher education institutions. In this chapter these parallel transformations-the digital and the institutional-are explored and the question of whether the universities are exploiting their increased autonomy and strategic capacity to harness the power of the digitalization idea to strategically profile themselves in an increasingly competitive market of higher education is investigated. Through analyses of development contracts, which represent vital governance documents, the institutional translation of and commitment to digitalization is explored and it is discussed how digitalization is used and not used as strategic profiling in Danish universities.