The Growth of Knowledge and Its Link to Digital Transformation in Arab Institutes of Higher Education

The growth of knowledge, and the consequential need to record and store ever-increasing amounts of data, plays a fundamental role in the promotion of digital transformation, and this is particularly true of its use in Arab higher education institutions (HEIs). Moreover, as a result of the increasing role played by technology in everyday life and, in particular, in shaping the way HEIs across the world adapt to new opportunities and challenges, the growth of knowledge drives the innovations that enable large-scale digital transformation. This, of course, leads to changing expectations of education in a knowledge-based society. Universities and other providers of education must now expect to undergo substantial digital transformation if they are to fulfill the demands of today’s generation of students and the fully digitized world in which they will be living (Jassim and Rahman in Turkish J Comput Math Educ 12(13):5152–516, 2021, [1]). In the twenty-first century, a knowledge-based workforce, and economic and technological competition between countries, will become increasingly important. This will require the preparation of generations of learners who can master the skills of the modern technologies that are obligatory for development, and for the dissemination of culture between the generations. In this regard, today, digital transformation based on the growth of knowledge has become a cornerstone of higher education; for example, without digital transformation education could not have continued during the COVID-19 pandemic. Furthermore, digitalization and technology have made online learning, distance education and blended learning accessible to people of different backgrounds from all over the world. The accelerated pace of the growth of knowledge in society, and developments in information technology and the digital economy, have created a digital environment which provides the essential skills and competencies for achieving professional success. In the case of HEIs, this success is related to: teaching and learning, research and innovation, industry and community engagement, HEIs’ global profiles and their institutional effectiveness.