Introduction

The digitization of higher education refers to the development of information and communication technologies (ICT) and their use by teachers and students for teaching/learning purposes.

It should be noted that the challenges of digitizing private higher education in Cameroon (I) and its prospects in the city of Bafoussam (II) are of various kinds.

I- The challenges of digitizing private higher education in Cameroon

These include improving the performance of teachers (A) and ensuring the success of students (B).

A- Improving teacher performance

With the use of ICT, the teacher moves out of his classical sphere of “information transmitter” to embrace the paroxysmal stage of “learning facilitator”, which for Marcus BRAUER (2011) is one of the best performance-oriented pedagogies.

Using ICT, the university teacher provides exercises for students to research. This process enables the teacher to initiate his students better and improve the quality of his courses. It’s a way for the teacher to get greater buy-in, participation and involvement from his or her students.

B- Student Success

The use of ICT in higher education could lead to academic and professional success for students. It is both a source of motivation and an optimal means of achieving good results for students (KULIK, 1994 and KARSENTY, 2005). It can help students deepen their knowledge of course content and engage in the construction of their knowledge.

A student’s use of ICT can enable him or her to acquire and develop specific skills that set him or her apart from other graduates, and which may enable him or her to win a job in a difficult society like ours.

II- Prospects for the city of Bafoussam-Cameroon

We will look at the future (A) before considering the prospects for the future (B).

A- Prospective analysis

Integrating ICT into higher education is not enough to achieve positive results. The choice of content must also be optimal. It’s not easy to choose the right content when there’s a flood of information on search networks. The wrong content will not enable ICT to play a positive role in higher education. Recognizing the right content remains a major challenge for students and some teachers in the city of Bafoussam-Cameroon. In some of the city’s institutes of higher education, few teachers have mastered research tools, which is justified by the fact that they take vast amounts of content from Google and are unable to synthesize it to pass on to their students.

What’s more, access to ICT conditions its positive value in the world of higher education (TAMER Hind, 2019). However, access to ICTs is not always easy for all students in Bafoussam-Cameroon. In this city, poverty makes things more difficult, so some find it hard to get hold of an ICT tool. Although they have them, the conditions for using them for educational purposes are not always very favourable for those lucky enough to have them. For example, the lack of data prevents some people from accessing useful information on research networks.

B- Prospects

Tomorrow’s world will be a quasi-digital one. At some point, the world of education in general, and higher education in particular, will focus solely on ICT, to the detriment of traditional teaching methods.

We need to be optimistic if we are to see the integration of ICT into higher education as a means of rationalizing and progressively improving performance in the field of higher education. A modicum of pessimism is also conceivable. Total abandonment of the classical method could lead to tragedy, as higher education loses its real value. In the days to come, students could be confused about which information to retain: that of their teachers’ lectures or that present on research networks. By favouring ICT, teachers could lose their value. From this point of view, students would prefer courses on Google, for example, and would have a thought delegitimizing the courses of their real teachers.

Conclusion

ICT has a vital role to play in today’s academic world. However, teachers and students need to be better guided towards the optimal use of this medium, whose importance in education is well established to achieve better results.