Peculiarities of Digital Transformation of Higher Educational Institutions in Georgia

Georgia joined the Bologna process in 2005 at the Bergen summit. In addition, the country signed the association agreement with Europe in 2014, where the country's commitment to developing digital infrastructure in the country was outlined. In this regard, according to the 2021–2027 agenda of the association agreement between the European Union and Georgia, the importance of stimulating the digital economy and innovation in the country, promoting the development of e-governance and digital services, along with the development of digital skills and e-literacy of the broad strata of the population, was specified. Consequently, the reforms in the Georgian educational sector were actively launched, and the need for the digital transformation of educational institutions, including higher education institutions, was on the agenda. Taking into account the recent Covid pandemic, on June 12, 2020, amendments were made to the Law of Georgia on “Higher Education,” where 477 articles specified the essence of distance learning and the features of its implementation. In particular, paragraphs 3 and 4 of this article define the obligation to select and properly use a distance learning application/platform for higher educational institutions, develop instructions/video guide for the use of the selected distance learning application/platform, and introduce it to students and staff of higher education institutions. Based on the abovementioned changes, the higher educational institutions operating in Georgia (in the 2021–2022 academic year, 19 state and 45 private higher educational institutions are operating in Georgia.) have actively started to take care of meeting the existing requirements. In particular, first of all, to conduct educational processes interactively, higher education institutions purchased electronic online training programs. The choice was mainly made on such software as zoom, jitsi, google meet, and Microsoft Teams. In addition, the e-learning programs for internal use owned by the universities were activated and functionally improved; the book fund was updated/supplemented with digital resources, the digitization of student services and management processes of higher education institutions became the top priorities, etc. It is worth noting that, along with the implementation of the mentioned processes, the problems accompanying the digitization process appeared consequently, in particular, the lack of digital skills, both among students and among the staff of higher educational institutions, less willingness to observe the norms of academic integrity in the process of online education; problems of infrastructural provision of universities and students, access to an unlimited Internet, etc. With these mentioned problems in view, higher education institutions actively started working on developing and implementing digital development strategies and action plans, which are clearly not a one-time process and require constant development. In this paper, we will discuss distinctive characteristics of the digital transformation implementation process that has taken place in HEIs in Georgia.