Developing Digitally Savvy Faculty: Institutional Strategies for Sustainable Digital Transformation

Faculty struggles with digital technology are too often framed as individual failures-evidence of resistance, incompetence, or unwillingness to change. Smart universities reject this simplistic explanation. Recent scholarship argues that digital competence is not a personal deficit but a reflection of institutional culture, professional learning structures, and pedagogical priorities. As higher education races to remain competitive in an accelerating digital landscape, faculty are expected to adopt new tools, platforms, and modalities, often without the time, training, or support such transformation requires. This chapter examines what it truly means for faculty to keep pace with digital technology, rejecting narrow definitions of competence grounded in tool mastery or performance metrics. Instead, it contends that digital fluency emerges from sustained institutional investment, ongoing professional learning, and a culture that rewards curiosity, experimentation, and care-centered pedagogy. “Keeping pace” with technology, then, is not about asking faculty to run faster, but about whether institutions are willing to redesign the conditions under which meaningful, human-centered teaching can thrive in a digital world.