Different conceptions of digital university in Ibero-America

Abstract

Recently, the term of digital university has been a buzzword or trend in different contexts in Spanish-speaking countries. However, there is no available clear definition of the concept that helps us specify its implementation further. Therefore, this study was aimed at analyzing the different existing conceptions of digital university in Ibero-America, via a systematic literature review and the analysis of the semantic field through a network analysis. This enabled us to identify what was understood by being a digital university from the perspective of different Ibero-American universities. Spanish keywords derived from the thesaurus -including “digital university”- were used in the search through diverse catalogs and databases, and documents of different kinds were found between 2007 and 2017. The literature review was based on the abstracts of the documents and we considered the creation of categories with diverse topics that represent how Ibero-America understands the digital university and with which restrictions has to deal with. The discussion incorporates the integration of those categories and topics into the digital university models that were previously identified. As a conclusion, a summary on the concept of digital university is presented and we point towards some remarks so that the conception is made a reality in its practice.

Keywords

• universidad a distancia
• investigación sobre literatura científica
• análisis conceptual
• análisis de redes
• América Latina
• España.