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The use of cutting-edge technology in education has the potential to transform the learning experience and greatly contribute to the achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in emerging economies. With the increased accessibility of technology and online resources, digital literacy has become an essential skill in today's world. Smart e-learning platforms have emerged as a new tool for offering education and training in emerging economies, while also boosting digital literacy.

This chapter will attempt to investigate the impact of new-age technologies on the educational system and how they can help emerging economies achieve the SDGs. This study looks at case studies from various emerging economies, analyzing how innovative technologies like digital learning, smart teaching and learning, mobile learning, online learning, artificial intelligence (AI), virtual reality, and gamification are used to improve education quality and promote SDGs. This chapter emphasizes the impact of technological integration on access to education, reducing inequality, and improving educational quality and relevance. This study also looks into how education may help promote environmental sustainability and economic growth. According to the findings, integrating new-age technologies into the education system can be a game changer in achieving SDGs in emerging nations.

This chapter provides an overview of two generally applicable frameworks relating to the use of technology-enhanced learning – ‘affordances’ and multimedia learning effects. First, the concept of ‘affordances’ as action potentials of technologies is identified as a way to think through technology-enhanced learning design possibilities, so as to help make technology selection decisions. Second, multimedia learning effects including the multimedia effect, the modality effect, the redundancy effect, the split-attention effect, and the personalization effect are presented as a scientific basis for understanding how to create cognitively effective learning experiences using text, images, sound, and video. Both affordances and multimedia learning effects are characterized as ongoing areas of research that are somewhat related, with the successful utilization of each depending on critical application by the designer.

This chapter aims to establish a positive vision for the technology-enhanced learning design field. It commences by summarizing the current state of technology-enhanced learning research, as established by the previous analysis, in order to clarify the foundations upon which the field can build. The future of learning technology is considered, in the first instance, by extrapolating trends in information and communication technologies throughout history. This process showcases how the most impactful technologies are those that bring information closer to us, support sharing, and offer more visceral learning experiences. The nature of learning technology trends occurring in recent Horizon Reports, for instance, gesture-based computing, augmented reality, Massive Open Online Courses, and table computing, are analyzed and explained in terms of Roger’s Diffusion of Innovation Theory and Gartner’s Hype Cycle. This leads to identifying teachers as the critical lynch pin in order for society to derive greatest educational benefit from the exponential advances in technology. Consequently, support for educators is argued as essential. Into the future the learning technology field will only optimize its progress if educators and researchers work together to understand design issues and possibilities. Directions forward for educators and researchers are proposed, emphasizing a research-driven, pedagogically focused, creative, and collaborative approach to technology-enhanced learning design.

The chapters in this book focus on three key areas of innovation in teaching and learning in higher education today: smartphone devices, texting applications, and multipurpose, multimedia mobile communicative applications such as Skype. Today's educators have at their disposal a wide array of digital technologies that enable them to enhance the teaching and learning process. These technologies, coupled with more valid and reliable learning theories, are revolutionizing the way we teach and are altering our notions of what it means to learn and live in a post-industrial, globalized world. Both individually and socially, these new mobile technologies are becoming increasingly popular and useful as educational tools across a wide range of disciplines as a means to engage and retain students. If used appropriately and purposefully, these mobile technologies are well suited for the increasingly interconnected and interdependent world we live in and they provide educators with another set of tools by which to enrich the teaching and learning process and educational outcomes (Kukulska-Hulme, 2012).

New mobile platforms, connected seamlessly to the Internet via wireless access, become increasingly more powerful as each day passes. Smartphones and tablet computers, as well as other ultraportable devices, have already gained enough critical mass to be considered mainstream devices, being present in the daily lives of millions of higher education students. Whole firms, devoted solely to developing high-quality and high engagement content to these devices, have emerged, populating an application market of thousands of teaching applications (apps) focused on diverse higher education topics, from physics and calculus to anatomy and law. Many universities throughout the world have already adopted or are planning to adopt mobile technologies in many of their courses as a better way to connect students with the subjects they are studying. These new mobile platforms allow students to access content anywhere/anytime to immerse himself/herself into that content (alone or interacting with teachers or colleagues via web communication forms) and to interact with that content in ways that were not previously possible (via touch and voice recognition technologies, for instance). The study of such technologies and their possible uses for higher education, as well as the impacts they can have on stimulating more active participation and engagement with the course subjects and research in higher education, while at the same time fostering collaboration among students and even different institutions, is the goal of the proposed chapter. Through the evaluation of the teacher/student acceptance and adoption of such mobile technologies, this chapter plans to provide a thorough overview of the possibilities and consequences of mobile learning in higher education environments as a gateway to ubiquitous learning – perhaps the ultimate form of learner engagement, since it allows the student to learn, access and interact with important content in any way or at any time or place she/he might want.

This chapter is the result of an interest in the professional and research literature exploring the intersection between education and digital technology. Decades of research and press have largely focused on the ways in which particular devices might be productively used in the K-12 classroom. Educational radio, educational television, the computer, and more recently the tablet have all been framed as being valuable for supporting student learning. Critics such as Neil Selwyn have argued that research in educational technology needs to focus less on supporting particular devices and more on the nature of social interactions that are mediated, constrained, and enabled by various technological affordances.

This chapter reviews four theoretical frameworks in terms of their approach the social nature of the use of technology in education.

The chapter introduces a number of conceptual frameworks that are helpful for considering the social implications of using digital technologies to support the needs of diverse learners in a teacher education classroom.

Scholars, especially who are also teacher educators can consider using and developing frameworks that are more robust for thinking about digital learning in education.

The value in this chapter lies in the critical conceptions explored and interrogated. The author demonstrates the complexity of teacher knowledge overlaid with technology.

A social movement is sweeping the globe in the form of Internet delivered and open access sharing spaces. People are connecting in new ways while personalizing their daily experiences with shared websites called Web 2.0 technologies. This chapter looks into the implications of taking these technologies beyond social interactions into the learning experiences of students. With a literature review and case study analysis, the goal of this chapter is to gain a better understanding of what is needed to appropriate quality instructional strategies to the online university course room including social sites such as Facebook, Twitter, Second Life®, and wikis. Following a brief history and descriptions of the Web 2.0 sites and functions, the reader is introduced to the design expectations typical of instructional designers (IDs) with definitions and standards from the field's literature. Support is offered from the business and educational literature for incorporating leadership into design practice through vision, strategy, and theory-based decisions. Definitions, benchmarks, and examples of instructional strategies and activities for learner engagement complete the theoretical framework for the chapter. Given the added complexities of advanced technologies, this chapter suggests evaluating social learning through an ID leadership perspective for a more informed recommendation of Web 2.0 online affordances. Following a case analysis of Second Life®, a 3-D virtual world used for learning activities, implications for ID practice are discussed, along with the various benefits and barriers of adopting Web 2.0 technologies. In the conclusion, suggestions are given for future research on the potential for integration of Web 2.0 affordances into online learning designs for rich, engaging learning experiences.

The Fashion Design Podcast Initiative educated students about podcasting by having the students share in the teaching activities as part of learning. The faculty implemented Lernen durch Lehren (LdL) or “Learning by Teaching” pedagogy and Bloom's revised taxonomy to encourage and support creativity, independence, confidence, and soft skills (i.e., teamwork, communication, decision making, research, exploration, and presentation skills) with emerging technologies. By creating educational podcasts, students developed skills in new technologies and disseminated information to educate others about fashion design. Faculty and students discovered the benefits and drawbacks with emerging technologies as teaching strategies.

The twentieth century is sometimes characterized as a technological era; and most people find this description easy to accept because they have seen a dramatic proliferation of technological goods and services that are readily available in all societies. In fact, life for most people throughout the world has changed mostly because of the rapid pace of technological advances. For example, medical technology has vastly improved the health of much of the world's populations; and modern communication technologies have made the world more accessible, thus helping diverse learners with disabilities to enjoy the benefits of the twenty-first century life. The challenge now is how to improve the educational opportunities offered to individuals who have highly variable abilities. One promising way to relieve this pressure is the use of educational and assistive technologies to provide appropriate support that is differentiated based on learner needs. In this chapter, we discuss the use of technology to enhance special education. Embedded in our discussions are future perspectives on dealing with roadblocks that face general and special educators using technology in learning processes.

In recent years, we have seen a paradox. No matter how much the government strives to incorporate technology into classrooms as a learning resource for students, both national and international reports prove that this is a difficult aim to achieve purpose. Training both preservice and in-service teachers is vitally important for technology to become part of everyday school life. But to achieve this, we must move away from the techno-centric focus of technology. This chapter analyzes the importance of focusing on implementing technologies in the learning activities that teacher-trainers design to prepare preservice teachers. We describe seven types of activities: assimilative, informative management, applicative, communicative, productive, experiential, and evaluation. All of these technology-based learning activities, organized in learning sequences, potentially help teachers to come to terms with technological knowledge in their pedagogical content area.