Chapter 7: Higher Education and Teacher Competences in the Digital Transformation Process

The digital world continues to develop and change with the development of technology and the beginning of the fourth industrial revolution. In parallel with these developments, the importance of information today is rapidly increasing and the phenomenon of change is gaining new momentum every day. In this rapid change, it is seen that the areas where digitalization is more widespread stand out. Defining digital transformation as a process requires a process design that concerns the past and present as well as the future (Bozkurt et al., 2021).

Toffler (1980), in his work The Third Wave, mentions 3 types of waves that deeply affect societies. The first wave is the agricultural society that replaced the hunter-gatherer society. The second wave is the industrial society in which mass society is the dominant feature. The third wave is the information society, which coincides with the post-industrial period. The most fundamental characteristic of the information society is that information is the determinant of power in every sense. The fact that information is at the centre of the third wave has increased the need for information, and as a result of this need and the increase in the capacity to produce information, information has been at the centre of social developments. For example, in the folding curve of knowledge expressed by Fuller (1982), it is stated that knowledge was doubled every 500 years from the 1400s to the 1900s, this period decreased to 50 years from the 1900s to the 1950s, and today, knowledge is doubled every 12 hours (Bozkurt et al., 2021).