The future of education in the era of the digital economy / Dr. Hafizah Hammad Ahmad Khan, Raveenthiran Vivekanantharasa and Dr. Azyyati Anuar

The digital economy, also known as the new economy, refers to the economy driven by digital technologies (Goldfarb & Tucker, 2019). The concept of digital economy started to emerge the following Fourth Industrial Revolution (IR 4.0) when many things started to become digitalised and greatly changed how people live and how goods are delivered and consumed (Jiang, 2020; UNCTAD, 2019). Due to the emergence of the digital economy, most of the businesses that operate through a physical store have started to move towards e-commerce platforms, while goods that were previously consumed in the form of tangible goods also have begun to become digitalised such as the Digital Video Disc (DVD) and books which now can also be accessed in the form of a digital product. Among businesses that successfully emerged in the digital economy era include e-hailing services such as Uber and Grab as well as the streaming services company such as Netflix. Interestingly, Netflix, an American streaming services company which first started as a video rental company before switching to online streaming services, has successfully made use of digital technologies to gain more profits (Au-Yong-Oliveira et al., 2020). Today, Netflix has become among the top online streaming companies, gained more than 200 million subscribers worldwide, and began producing its standard content. Since then, many companies have started to offer the online streaming services including Viu, iQIYI, iFlix, and others. Besides, Google which first started as a search engine service also continued to expand its operations by offering other services such as cloud computing and online video conferencing. Recently, following the Covid-19 outbreak that affected almost all countries through out the entire world, all economic sectors have been greatly affected including the education sector (Hoofman & Secord, 2021; Pokhrel & Chhetri, 2021). The school and learning institution closure has resulted in a massive disruption in the education sector in early 2020 (Hammerstein et al., 2021). However, the teaching and learning activities can be continued with the support of digital technologies. Although, digital technology in education started before the pandemic, the pandemic has shown that the usage and readiness are still low, especially among the educators and learners in low- and middle-income countries.