Abstract:

The digital transformation in education is an inevitable result of the developing affordance of digital technology for education. This paper discusses the barriers, difficulties, and coping strategies in the educational digital transformation. It first describes three stages of future panoramic transformation of education: infrastructure upgrading, learning mode reforming, and educational process reengineering. The digital transformation of education, as a technology-involved innovative social revolution, is not bound to be a smooth journey. The interaction between technologies and education subjects is affected by multiple factors, thus leading to various corresponding difficulties and obstacles. The surface difficulties mainly come from the barriers of technological availability in building the new education infrastructure, referring to limited investments (e.g., human & financial) and technical bottlenecks. The deep difficulties mean educational subjects’ (e.g., teachers, students, & parents) action obstacles. The core difficulty is how to improve the consensus on digital educational innovation and how to deal with the relationship between humans and technology. To solve the core difficulty of educational digital transformation, it is necessary to carry out structural reform in education and strengthen the basic research of learning science to have a deep understanding of the process and mechanism of education with digital transformation. Finally, this paper puts forward several practical strategies to solve these difficulties from three levels: foundation-building strategies, empowering strategies, and exploring strategies.

Key words: digital transformation in education, future education, technology affordance, transformation difficulties