How Can Effective Strategies be Adapted for the Digital Transformation of Higher Vocational Colleges?——A Hybrid Research Method Based on LDA and fsQCA

The digital transformation of vocational education constitutes a strategic initiative for the high-quality development of vocational education and provides robust support for building an education power. Taking typical digital transformation cases of 40 higher vocational colleges across the country as research samples, this paper adopted the LDA model to identify the core driving factors of digital transformation in higher vocational colleges, and empolyed the fsQCA method to explore configuration paths of different driving conditions in the transformation process. The results showed that the key elements of digital transformation in higher vocational colleges consisted of digital technology embedding, digital resources construction, teachers’ digital literacy, digital governance level, and industry-education integration promotion, which jointly formed a complex multi-dimensional dynamically coupled ecosystem of “technology-organization-environment”. Further analysis revealed that the driving paths for high-quality digital development of higher vocational colleges can be classified into three types: “technology-organization collaborative evolution type”, “multi-element and multi-dimensional coupled drive type”, and “organizational-environment dynamic adaption type”. Based on the research findings, future approaches were proposed to boost the high-quality digital development of higher vocational colleges, which included adhering to the systematic concept, improving collaborative system, adhering to tailoring measures to the specific conditions of each school, exploring multiple paths, strengthening key elements and making up for construction weaknesses.