When Digital Transformation Meets Brains the Role of Instructors as Innovators in Higher Education

This paper presents evidence that successful digital transformation is associated with the level and scope of an innovator’s experience. We select higher education as an example of a knowledge-based sector, and investigate digital innovation in delivering university courses as a response to the COVID-19 shutdown. A difference-in-differences model is employed to isolate the effect of a shift from a face-to-face delivery mode to an asynchronous digital delivery mode on student grades. While many instructors and students associate digital classrooms with a screen of black tiles, the digital transformation of higher education reaches far beyond this. Our focus is on genuinely transformed digital delivery modes, such as test bank offerings and tutorial videos. We find a significant improvement in student performance among only instructors who teach quantitative courses, have high levels of experience or expend high levels of effort. The results suggest that these individual characteristics of the digital innovators are of primary importance. In contrast, university spending does not contribute to this benefit of asynchronous digital delivery modes. Digital transformation in a knowledge-based sector such as higher education is not equally effective across the board but crucially depends on the brains behind it.