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As institutions acknowledge the importance of adopting digital transformation, the higher education setting is realising a prompt and transformative change internationally. This chapter explores the effect of digitalisation in the sphere of higher education, whilst underlining its significance for Kuwait. By adopting digital transformation, higher education institutions in Kuwait can facilitate robust sustainable development and adopt a culture of bold innovation. The objective of Kuwait Vision 2035 is to make use of digital transformation as an approach to enhance the overall quality of education. This may include incorporating advanced teaching methods, a modified curriculum, and innovative evaluation methods supported by technology. Digital tools can enhance the learning experience and provide students with a more interactive and engaging education. By capitalising on digital infrastructure, aiding teachers, and encouraging partnerships, Kuwait aims to prepare students with useful digital skills, advance innovation and stimulate progress in a knowledge-based economy. Likewise, by means of extensive and lifelong learning, Kuwait intends to be at the forefront of digital education by making a sizeable contribution to economic prosperity and sustainable development.

This chapter discusses the role of language in the transformation of two African institutions of higher education, namely the University of Botswana (in Botswana) and the University of KwaZulu-Natal (in South Africa). The transformation of the University of KwaZulu-Natal, which is aimed at addressing the inequalities and other ills of the apartheid era, has taken on board language issues. For instance, isiZulu is being developed and promoted to join English as a language of scholarship. In contrast, the University of Botswana’s transformation does not stem from a political background of oppression. The institutional transformation has to do internationalization and the conversion into a research-intensive university. This transformation, unlike at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, has not taken a strong move to develop and promote Setswana (Botswana’s national language) as a language of scholarship.

Due to a change in higher education and adult education ideas and practices globally that have become more learner-centered, higher education is undergoing a transformation at a rate never before seen. Education has also evolved into a lifetime endeavor as the importance of higher education and adult learning has grown. In light of the fact that it offers guidance on how people can find purpose in their lives, transformative learning theory has a prominent position in higher education and adult education. By critically examining their presumptions and expectations and updating them to support higher education students' successful learning, educators can transform their theory and practice of instruction through active and transformative learning. Adapting to the changing capacities brought on by digitization, technological advancements, growing technological connectivity, global market expansion, mobility and migration, and workplace diversity is becoming more and more difficult for higher education institutions. The idea of active and transformative learning and transformative learning strategies are discussed in detail in this chapter to help readers understand their importance and function in effective teaching and learning in the transforming world of higher education. This chapter's major contribution to Active and Transformative Learning: Digital Transformation in Education is the provision of a comprehensive guide and strategy on how to successfully incorporate digital technologies into the teaching and learning process in order to improve student engagement, knowledge acquisition, and the growth of critical thinking skills.

The chapter explores the challenges in the financial education of the new generation under the influence of digital transformation, building awareness, and compliance with the new model of society. The rapid development of technology significantly influences our daily lives, thus making us look at the progress of various processes differently, thus facilitating the social and professional performance of subjects. The need for a comprehensive, fast, and logical personality is growing in a society that can analyse a set of different interconnections, draw logical conclusions, and assess risks. The impact of technology is particularly felt in educating future financiers, as accounting, financial analysis, and financial management decision-making have long been unthinkable without the skills to use various computer programmes, big data processing, and visualisation of financial information using the latest information technology tools. The survey was organised to collect data from student questionnaires. The questionnaire analysis allows for assessing students’ digital competences, advantages and drawbacks of the digitalisation process, and university challenges in the digital transformation process as well as detecting the areas that require additional attention to make digital transformation effective. Digital transformation significantly changes the ecosystem, and the level of students’ abilities and skills is also a variable. Therefore, it is important to identify the readiness of the participants in the higher education system for new challenges and to use the limited resources as efficiently as possible to prepare the financial specialists necessary for the development of society.

Using a decolonial framework for thinking about knowledge, education and internationalisation, this chapter critically unpacks the historical and contemporary complexities in South African higher education, including the colonial roots of higher education and internationalisation, the Eurocentric hegemony and white domination during colonialism and apartheid, and the lack of epistemic decolonisation in post-apartheid South Africa. The chapter shows how the way internationalisation has been practiced by universities since the end of apartheid has contributed to the maintenance of Eurocentric hegemony and coloniality of knowledge. The chapter highlights the need to rethink, reconceptualise and redefine internationalisation, and unpacks a new definition of internationalisation which takes into consideration historical complexities, contemporary realities and challenges, and the need for epistemic transformation and decolonisation in South African higher education. This is in line with Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s decolonial ‘quest for relevance’ of education and knowledge to the people, places and regions in which universities operate, while looking outwards at the world and critically engaging with the plurality of worldviews, ideas, knowledges and ways of knowing. Such a quest could allow students to critically interrogate and understand their being and place in the world, as well as their relationships and linkages to others around the globe.

The COVID-19 pandemic has had a significant impact on higher education (HE) across the globe, including in Bangladesh. The Bangladeshi HE system is going through an abrupt transition and transformation to cope with the crisis. This chapter is based on data collected from teachers and students of Bangladeshi public and private HE institutions regarding teaching and learning during the COVID-19 lockdown. In Bangladesh, some universities switched to online distance teaching and learning quickly during this period, and others lagged behind in this regard. Teachers and students from both groups of public and private universities participated in the study, including those who attended online teaching and learning activities and those who did not participate. This chapter highlights both teachers’ and students’ perspectives regarding students’ future preparedness for participating fully in the changing landscape of HE, especially technology-enhanced teaching and learning. Understanding these perspectives of teachers and students is important to address the digital divide and social justice issues in the policy and practice. Within the HE sector in Bangladesh, it is especially vital while transforming its education system and adapting emerging technologies to address the challenges of education in future emergencies.

The chapter attempts to articulate a possibility for integrating a number of perspectives in studying higher education as a scholarly subject in current social science. We begin with the reasons for such an undertaking and its relevance. We then develop several basic definitions in order to establish a common conceptual basis for discussion. The final section presents new institutionalism as one of the ways to integrate several approaches in understanding higher education.

This chapter is rather theoretical and methodological in its outlook. We develop the basic approach that, in many respects, is still a work in progress. We take in this approach a set of arguments that open up new research agenda rather than settled a perception to be accepted uncritically.

Globalization has become such an all-encompassing concept that it is almost meaningless. However, most scholars recognize that the term conveys in some manner or form a shrinkage of time and space such that events happening in one part of the world have the potential to impact other locales (Giddens, 1999; Held, 1991). Beyond this most basic meaning, it is hard to find any agreement on what the term actually conveys or when in fact the world actually entered a global age (Morrow & Torres, 2000). Given the vagueness of globalization as a concept, the challenge then is to be as clear as possible in discussing various forces related to globalization that may impact a particular phenomenon under study. In the case of this chapter, the phenomenon of interest is university transformation in the developing world.

The history of Soviet higher education was closely intertwined with the broader histories of Soviet-era general education, with science policies and research institutions, and with the various models of political economy that were embraced and then altered between 1917 and the collapse of the U.S.S.R. in 1991. Such close bureaucratic control and tight policy coordination were inherent in the state socialist higher education system that allowed no private institutions or alternative models to function (Chanbarisov, 1988), and was arguably the source of Soviet higher education's greatest strengths as well as the cause of its greatest weaknesses. State support and massive public investment meant that Soviet higher education witnessed some of the most rapid and truly impressive quantitative and institutional growth in the world (Yelyutin, 1959). In other words, Russian and then Soviet higher education grew from its modest domestic influence and marginal global status in the early 1900s to become one of the largest and most comprehensive systems of higher education and research in the postwar era.

This chapter is concerned with academic citizenry in higher education, and the conditions created within institutions for transformative leadership. This is central to the fitness-for-purpose of higher education institutions to drive the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.

Drawing from a mixed-method study, the chapter explores the patterns which emerged from literature, questionnaire responses, and semi-structured interviews about the problematics at play within six institutions in the post-colonial contexts of India and South Africa. The two upper middle-income contexts have strong constitutional commitments to democracy and social justice at the macro-level, with bold policy interventions undertaken at meso-level to address the legacies of exclusion and oppression in student enrollment and staff composition in HE. However, recent fraught dynamics and unrest within the sector in each country have brought renewed attention to the politics of participation and a breakdown in trust of governance and management.

In this study, the standpoint of key stakeholders was prioritized, including those in assigned leadership positions and academic staff. Particular attention was paid to gender and intersectional inequalities, impacting academic staff, and what they revealed about the persistence of policy-implementation gaps and their relation to principle-implementation gaps. Concerns are raised about impoverished comprehensions of, and conditions for, sustainable ethical leadership which emerged across both contexts.