University 4.0: The Future of Higher Education in the Age of Technology

The fourth industrial revolution has had an unprecedented impact on humanity. The disruptive technologies driving the new revolution's pervasive change have the most significant impact on the younger generation. Universities should produce and promote the best use of such technologies. The next-generation university's form, function, and purpose must be clarified. The future university has already been given new names, including ecological, distributed cyborg, decentralized, and Zoom University, along with several models that have been imagined. The most important question, though, is whether universities will continue to operate under the same framework in the future or whether they will fundamentally alter the nature of higher education. To imagine the future university as described, this study aims to achieve two main objectives. First, to explore and discuss various models related to University 4.0 and the 4th Industrial Revolution. Second, to analyze the perceptions of Engineering Educators about the term 'University 4.0'. The data elicited from a non-probabilistic international sample of professionals in Engineering Education show partial features, among which 'digitalization' predominates. This tendency supports the idea of a continuation with partial changes (named University 4.0) rather than a profound alteration like higher education (named University 4.1) from their perspective. An overview of University