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The purpose of this paper is to examine how higher education students think about educational technologies they have previously used – and the implications of this understanding for their awareness of datafication and privacy issues in a postsecondary context.

The authors conducted two surveys about students’ experience with the ClassDojo platform during their secondary education. In both surveys, the authors included a question asking students to identify which ClassDojo-like platform they used in school. For this study, the authors examined responses to these screening questions, identifying the technologies that responses referred to and sorting technologies into categories.

Students identified a wide range of technologies when prompted to identify a technology similar to ClassDojo. Many responses suggested students have a broad, monolithic understanding of educational technology. This suggests the prevalence of a utilitarian tool perspective (rather than a platform perspective) that may be entrenched by the time that students reach higher education, hampering efforts to inform and educate them in that context.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, there are few studies of students’ conflation of educational technologies in the extant literature. Furthermore, the platform perspective emphasized in this manuscript remains relatively rare in many fields associated with educational technology.

The objective of this study is to propose a model for the implementation of a technological platform for participants to develop solutions to problems related to the Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR) megatrends, and taking advantage of artificial intelligence (AI) to develop their complex thinking through co-creation work.

The development of the model is based on a combination of participatory action research and user-centered design (UCD) methodologies, seeking to ensure that the platform is user-oriented and based on the experiences of the authors. The model itself is structured around the active and transformational learning (ATL) framework.

This study highlights the importance of addressing 4IR megatrends in education to prepare students for a technology-driven world. The proposed model, based on ATL and supported by AI, integrates essential competencies for tackling challenges and generating innovative solutions. The integration of AI into the platform fosters personalized learning, collaboration and reflection and enhances creativity by offering new insights and tools, whereas UCD ensures alignment with user needs and expectations.

This research presents an innovative educational model that combines ATL with AI to foster complex thinking and co-creation of solutions to problems related to 4IR megatrends. Integrating ATL ensures engagement with real-world problems and critical thinking while AI provides personalized content, tutoring, data analysis and creative support. The collaborative platform encourages diverse perspectives and collective intelligence, benefiting other researchers to better conceive learner-centered platforms promoting 21st-century skills and co-creation.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the impact of personality traits on the perceived usability evaluation of e-learning platforms. In specific, perceived usability levels of the educational platforms and tools used in primary and secondary education in Greece are demonstrated. The impact which personality traits and other individual-related factors have on the perceived usability were also examined.

In total, 2,239 Greek primary and secondary education teachers participated in the study through an online survey. The system usability scale (SUS) and Big 5 personality test questionnaires were adopted, as well as a demographics questionnaire and nine platforms were examined: e-me, eclass, Google Classroom, Microsoft Teams, Cisco Webex, Edmodo, Padlet, Skype and Zoom.

Most platforms were rated as satisfactory in terms of perceived usability as measured by SUS. SUS scores were not found to be significantly related with participants’ age, gender, private/public school, working relationship. Furthermore, openness to new experience and extraversion demonstrated the strongest positive correlation with perceived usability evaluation.

The current study used a sample of Greek teachers as participants, so the generalizability of results without considering cultural or organizational issues is of questionable validity. The Big 5 personality test is widely adopted; however, it seems that it does not capture comprehensively all possible dimensions of personality.

Acknowledging the correlations between personality traits and perceived usability for each platform, teachers may now choose the most user-friendly one depending on the personality traits. Designers can adapt their systems to meet users’ needs accordingly. Moreover, the reported results provide a frame of reference for the respective organizations and companies to compare the quality of user experience of their products and services. Thus, development costs of an e-learning platform/tool can be reduced accordingly.

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Perceived usability of a technological system affects the way users interact with it and consequently the whole learning experience. Thus, factors which may affect perceived usability and, in turn, the learning outcomes are of paramount importance and should be exhaustively examined. Giving that personality affects or is related to, other parameters related with technology (technology adoption, perceived and actual use, acceptance, interaction, perceived ease of use), this study addresses a significant research gap and sheds light to the before-mentioned issues.

The purpose of this research is to enable dynamic customization of metadata that describes educational resources in digital repositories.

Users need to describe educational resources in digital repositories according to a user-specific metadata set. As users generally do not have the skills to customize the software application manually, this approach relies on the techniques of model-driven software engineering, which should allow customization of the software application programmatically with no need to develop or order a new software application. An experiment was conducted to evaluate the proposed solution.

A software platform for managing educational resources described by dynamically extendable metadata is proposed. The platform enables the creation of data models that are programmatically transformed to a Web application for the management of educational resources. In this way, users can create their own models of metadata that are relevant in a particular domain.

The solution has been verified by users with technical knowledge. The appropriateness of the model should still be explored for domain experts with little technical knowledge who desire to define new metadata in their domain.

The solution can be used for digital repositories that store diverse educational resources. Each resource could be described using metadata that relates to the domain the resource belongs to.

Digital repositories standardly describe educational resources using some general metadata, which are more focused on the physical characteristics of resources rather than their semantics. The proposed solution introduces custom domain-specific semantics into the description of the resources, which improves their retrieval.

Digital platforms have enabled the emergence of new business models by transforming the competitive scenario, labour, traditional management activities and strategies of the organisations regarding a number of productive sectors. The objective of this study is to analyse these changes in the educational sector from the view of professors who produce content in digital platforms, such as the massive open online courses (MOOCs).

In-depth interviews were conducted with 10 Brazilian professors using MOOC. The methodology proposed by Bardin (2011) and the board’s guidelines (2013) were used for content analysis.

Positive aspects such as autonomy, higher financial gains, geographic coverage, quality of life and cheaper and quicker courses were identified in the present study, whereas negative aspects were disclosure and sales performed by faculty members, problems with technical support, demand for new skills (e.g. digital marketing), new teaching methods and opportunities perceived by the professors.

The results found cannot be generalised to different publics and contexts.

The results contribute to a better understanding of the new business models on digital platforms as they show evidence of how these techniques are contributing to digital transformation of traditional sectors. This model can be used to connect professors who produce content to those who want to learn as well as to enable remote operations in educational institutions. Additionally, managers, CEOs and entrepreneurs of the sector can use MOOC as a reference when formulating their strategies.

Social networking platforms such as Facebook have infiltrated the lives of many students, and as such it is natural to consider how they can be effectively used to enhance learning. This chapter provides a comprehensive review of social networking in education from a design perspective. Social networking is defined based on Boyd & Ellison’s seminal definition of connected profiles, and is distinguished from social media for the purposes of investigation. Facebook, Edmodo, and other social networking platforms are briefly described, before summarizing the wide variety of social networking usage reported in the research literature. The various benefits of social networking in education are distilled from the literature, including their capacity to facilitate community building, collaboration, reflection, and expedient access to learning. Issues surrounding the educational use of social networking are also organized into themes, for instance privacy concerns, distraction, cyber-safety, and technical constraints. The implications of findings from the social networking literature are synthesized into learning design and implementation recommendations. The chapter concludes with a discussion of open questions and areas for further investigation.

The Coronavirus 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic has already had a significant disruptive impact on the society, posing challenges to the provision of education across the world. Due to this crises governments over the world have temporarily closed educational institutions to help reduce the spread of COVID-19. Accordingly, educational institutions are deploying innovative emergency remote teaching (ERT) and virtual learning (VL) approaches for students to study at home. Digital technologies are being employed as a positive response to COVID-19 pandemic. Therefore, this study draws on existing literature and theories of online learning and change management to provide evidence on the state of art of ERT and VL.

This current study employs a systemic review of 53 sources to provide descriptive analysis leveraging on secondary sources from the literature and document reports on theories of online learning and change management, COVID-19, pandemic, emergency remote teaching and virtual learning.

Findings from this study present the theories of online learning and change management and significance and challenges of adopting ERT and VL during the COVID-19 pandemic. Also, our findings present application platforms that are being deployed for the adoption of ERT and VL during and after COVID-19 pandemic. Lastly, the findings explore potential strategies as recommendations to be employed to improve current and future adoption of ERT and VL in educational institutions.

This study draws on existing literature and adds to existing body of knowledge by exploring the adoption of emergency remote teaching and virtual learning during and after COVID-19 pandemic. This study provides a timely guide on the potential of emergency remote teaching and virtual learning in higher education as a response to COVID-19 crises now and into the future. This study discusses the theories of online learning and change management and also offers recommendations to educationalists and policymakers in educational institutions on addressing the crisis.

This study aims to analyze the platforming scenario at a Brazilian university as well as the data security process for students and professors.

This research brings an analysis through a qualitative approach of the platformization process in a Brazilian teaching institution.

The results point to a lack of knowledge on the part of teachers regarding data security in the platforming scenario, as well as the lack of effectiveness of institutions in protecting student data.

Within the Brazilian scenario, this research seeks to contribute to the discussion on platformization in view of the gaps and existing demands on this process in the country.

While scholars recognize that digital technology is a major tool employed by contemporary learners to access knowledge, its full capacity is yet to be utilized. This paper investigates opportunities to increase individual learning engagement and knowledge retention in higher education and corporate environments through integrating educational content with innovative digital technology. Currently, within commonly adopted e-learning platforms, the most utilized online content delivery and student progress assessment tools in leadership education appear to be discussion-based instruction, along with written assignments, and research projects (Jenkins, 2016). To inform leadership educators’ choice in innovative tools for increased effectiveness of instruction, this paper shares an experience of delivering integrated global leadership education pedagogical content (i.e., cross-cultural competency instruction for graduate management class at a U.S.-based public university) within a gamified real-time multiuser learning platform—MyAltis—and discusses implications for leadership education.

One impediment of e-government implementation is the lack of e-(government) competences among public officials, especially because foundational education programs fail to teach them. Therefore, this study suggests massive open online course (MOOC)-based continuous education. This study aims to design and evaluate a MOOC and MOOC platform for acquiring e-competence in the public sector and principles for such platforms to capture their inherent design knowledge.

This study uses design science research incorporating qualitative and quantitative methods and draws on established patterns of formulating design principles (DPs).

The core results are a physically instantiated MOOC platform and six DPs: DP of 1) easy access and easy use, 2) professional exchange, 3) protected space, 4) domain focus, 5) cooperation with higher education institutions and 6) promotion from higher government level.

This study contributes to e-government research by extending the design knowledge for the construction of domain-specific MOOC platforms. Moreover, the study contributes to platform economics by discussing existing theses and outlining new opportunities. The research also entails limitations, as the authors have solely considered MOOCs and neglected complimentary offers to sustain learning success.

This study provides practitioners with design principles they can use in their efforts to construct education platforms for the public sector. Moreover, the study presents a working MOOC platform instantiating these DPs, and thus provides an exemplary reference.

Not fulfilling expectations regarding digital public services comes with a risk of decreasing trust in public organizations and the overall government. The results of this study contribute to enabling public officials fulfilling stakeholders’ expectations and generating public value.

By linking e-government competence education with MOOC platform design, this research approximates an important research gap. Scholars previously investigated e-competences and focused on alone-standing MOOCs to convey those. The results of this study offer the potential to construct platforms to centralize such fragmented solutions, maximizing their impact among public officials.