Keyword: digital education governance

ABSTRACT: Employability has emerged as a central strategic concern in higher education, requiring institutions to adopt integrated, system-level approaches rather than fragmented skill-based interventions. This study develops a Cognitive Model of Employability that aligns Daubney’s KASE framework (Knowledge, Attributes, Skills, Experience), Kolb’s experiential learning cycle, and Social Cognitive Career Theory (SCCT) to examine how employability is constructed, governed, and operationalised within digital learning environments. Drawing on a systematic theory mapping approach and a thematic analysis of 100 undergraduate student reflections from a virtual internship platform, the study demonstrates how cognitive mediating factors—such as self-regulation, motivation, and metacognition—link experiential learning processes to the development and articulation of employability outcomes. The findings position employability as a cognitively mediated and strategically governed process, shaped by institutional design, pedagogical structure, and individual agency. The study contributes to the field of strategy and governance in education by proposing that employability should be understood as an interaction among designed learning, embedded cognition within curriculum governance, and an integrated system in which employability is strategically scaled, rather than as a fixed list of skills.

ABSTRACT: Over the last two decades, education systems have become increasingly digital. This digitalization goes beyond classroom teaching processes; it also raises a governance issue concerning where educational data is collected, who provides the digital infrastructure, and at what level decision-making authority is exercised. Based on the OECD's report comparing 29 education jurisdictions, our study classifies these jurisdictions along four dimensions: the level of centralization of decision-making authority, public control over educational data, whether the digital infrastructure is provided by the public sector or through private platforms, and the binding nature of data protection rules. In our study, we transformed these four dimensions into a digital sovereignty score and evaluated the jurisdictions under four governance typologies. Our findings reveal that digital governance in education is not geographically uniform. In systems with a strong tradition of centralized governance, public control over data and infrastructure is more pronounced, while in systems with high levels of school autonomy, dependence on private providers increases. This study examines this dependence within the framework of data colonialism, arguing that the transfer of educational data to private platforms creates a new problem of digital sovereignty.