Sistema Regional de Información
en línea para Revistas Científicas de América Latina,
el Caribe, España y Portugal

The need for increased scalability, interoperability and flexibility of educational provision is driving the expansion of digital and open learning in higher education. As this movement spreads across institutions worldwide, distance education universities find themselves in a crisis. Technologyenhanced learning is now mainstream in higher education institutions and most have embraced open educational practices as well due to the great impact of MOOCs. In this new fast-growing, chaotic and unstable context, research-based expertise, a dedicated infrastructure and specially-trained staff may no longer seem required for institutions to provide distance and eLearning. Furthermore, new noninstitutional non-formal higher education providers of open online or blended learning courses and programmes are emerging as a result of community or special interest group-led initiatives. Far from the days when they stood alone as unique institutions with the unique mission to provide an innovative kind of education, distance education universities are now competing openly with other conventional universities and other educational players. In a time of continuous reduction of public expenditure in higher education, a debate has emerged on the sustainability of these institutions, especially in Europe. In this paper we analyse the new social, economical and technological challenges and opportunities which distance education universities are faced with and discuss the reinterpretation of their typical mission. We also explore existing organisational models and propose a new one based on an open network approach.

This article gives an account of what is happening nowadays in the intersection of education and technology. It aims to offer an overview that starts not in the present but in the past so that we become aware of how more often than not we are trapped in political rhetoric and capitalistic discourses. Headings in newspapers from 1963 read, “Crowded schools. Overworked teachers. In today’s education turmoil, can your child obtain the personalized teaching that every child, average or advanced, need?” and for that problem the solution proposed was technological, hence, little has changed in relation to the crowded schools and overworked teachers. I then scrutinise the present through the invasion of platforms and the accompanying Silicon Valley discourse about universal solutions to education concluding that the situation does not look very different than at the beginning of the 20th century. The future is illustrated using my own research giving an account of my sociological oriented approach to educational research in the field. Critical realism and realist social theory are described briefly and proposed as a theoretical framework to think about these issues in a less deterministic way, giving its due importance to the local. It offers a theory-driven approach to a methodology that thinks about how to capture the daily entanglements of students with open and participatory digital tools in the context of their studies looking at uncovering the invisible thus hidden structures that operate as constraints for students’ agency in their digital practice.

The certification of digital competence is an issue that has been explored for some years butnowadays it is becoming more important because the Digital Agenda for Europe raised it in the framework of the Europe 2020 Strategy (European Commission, 2014). In the case of teachers in general, and university teachers in particular, digital competence is key in the performance of their profession. There are a lot of studies that have been carried out and applied instruments in order to measure digital competence, all of which share the point of view of self-perception, but not of certification. This article reviews the initiatives and mechanisms that different organizations have developed in order to certify digital competence. This search is the result of the state of the art analysis in the context of a research work whose main purpose is to design a certification instrument ofdigital competence for university teachers. Different certification instruments are presented in this paper and their analysis leads to the finding that only two of them focus on the digital teaching competence, one of which is the instrument developed by the INTEF (2017a) and the other is the instrument developed in our research. Our instrument is the only one in our context to certify the digital competence of university teachers, taken into account the characteristics of this professional profile. 

Decisions about learning and work have to be placed in a particular spatial, labour market and socio-cultural context – individuals are taking decisions within particular ‘opportunity structures’ and their decisions and aspirations are further framed by their understanding of such structures. This article examines ways in which learning about careers using open data and labour market intelligence can be applied. An illustrative case study of the LMI for All project in the UK shows the technical feasibility of designing and developing such systems and a model for dissemination and impact. The movement towards Open Data and increasingly powerful applications for processing and querying data has gathered momentum. This combined with the need for labour market information for decision making in increasingly unstable labour markets have led to the development and piloting of new Labour Market Information (LMI) systems, involving multiple user groups. Universal challenges exist given the increasing use of LMI, especially in job matching and the rapidly expanding use of open source data in differing education and employment settings. We highlight six emergent issues that have to be addressed so that open data and labour market intelligence can be applied effectively in differing contexts and settings. We conclude by reflecting on the urgent need to extend the body of research and to develop new methods of co-constructing in innovative collaborative partnerships.

The concept of Personal Learning Environments (PLE) is, one of the concepts in the field of educational technology that has gained more attention in during the last decade. Those of us who do research on this topic assume —perhaps naively— that this is a disruptive, a fundamental concept, at the base of the emergent pedagogical approaches that characterize the techno-social age we live in, not only from the technological and instrumental perspective, but its roots in the very foundations of the educational process. Nevertheless, we know very little about the impact of this concept - and other associated topics - on other educational issues that are not necessarily linked to technology. By means of a systematized review of the available literature, we analyzed the impact of the PLE topic on three main themes of the scientific literature in education produced during the last decade: emerging pedagogical practices, self-regulated learning and professional teacher development. The analysis is focused on whether (and how) the PLE concept has impacted each of the topics, the level of importance of that impact in each one of the themes and the way in which the concept is "materialized" in them. The conclusions of this article intend to offer suggestions on the future of research and the applications in practice of a concept that, after more than ten years of its emergence in the educational field, continues to be considered as emergent.

In this study, college students in a large public university in the U.S. were surveyed regarding what technologies they use most frequently for learning, what technologies they value for learning, and how they perceive technology effectiveness to support their learning. The results revealed that technology use and value were closely aligned with laptops and these were detailed as the most used and valued for learning, which underscores the importance of mobile and portable devices in supporting anytime anywhere learning. In terms of using software for learning, search engines, file-sharing tools, digital libraries, videos, and wikis obtained the best results, suggesting that students are adopting self-directed, approaches to their learning. Additionally, collaboration tools were perceived as the most important for learning which highlights the need to design better teaching strategies and learning interactions to support collaborative practices that use technology. Overall, the majority of participants perceived that technology was effective in fostering discussion, collaboration, and interaction. This enable experiential learning, supporting organization, planning, and resource management, and facilitating a personalized learning experience. The results also revealed statistically significant differences between the experiences of undergraduate and graduate students about the effectiveness of technology. Implications for integrating Web 2.0 technologies into teaching and learning practices are discussed.     

Immersed in this age of technological revolution, technologies and their good use and consumption as well as the capacity to communicate in one or several second languages contribute to the connection of the inhabitants of this globalized world: our communicative spaces have grown exponentially and this requires adequate training. This article analyzes the relationship between technology and teaching and learning languages from a historical and critical perspective. The appearance of different technologies in the domain of language teaching and learning is analyzed, as well as its effectiveness in the process of language learning, resulting in series of cycles of technological innovation, enthusiasm in relation to its possibilities, scarcity of outcome evidences and a call for caution about the impact of technology in itself. As a conclusion, a state of positive but judicious alertness towards the constant appearance of technologies which afford new opportunities of memorable learning is reasonably advised. 

The aim of this paper is to understand the process of forming relationships between educational institutions and students. The virtual education market is considered to be of great importance in our society, which is in constant development and highly competitive. Thus, the reasons for the relations between the perceived quality, trust, commitment, and loyalty were analyzed. Specifically, the factors to be taken into account are trust, perceived quality, commitment, and loyalty. In this exploratory study, in-deep educational interviews were done with experts (managers/coordinators), teachers, and students. The results show that the relevant reasons for the relationship between perceived quality and loyalty were: feelings of being well received, motivation, and credibility. The following reasons were found for trust and loyalty: transparency, commitment of the client/student with the institution, reflection on learning as a result of the course, and good faith. In relation to commitment and loyalty, cognitive commitment (calculative) was highlighted as the principal reason: the changes provided by the course.

In recent years we have witnessed an increasingly widespread use of social digital networks (DSN) for educational purposes. The students declare to make a didactic use of the networks and their tools and, at the same time, they recognize the collaborative work as a methodology that promotes their learning and that is fostered by the use of the DSN. Among the purposes of the following study, we find the question of the perceptions that students have regarding the use of social networks as an educational tool and to know their preferences regarding collaborative work. The research carried out falls within the so-called "ex post facto", not experimental and descriptive. The sample of the research was formed by 460 students who studied different degrees in the engineering area of a Chilean higher education institution, during the 2017-18 academic year. Among the remarkable results, we can affirm that the Internet is presenting itself as one of the technologies that is penetrating more strongly in the Universities, and that the students use it constantly for educational purposes. It is for these reasons that we consider that there are initial conditions for the incorporation of social networks to formal education. In addition, our results show that the interest to work with other students determines the attitude of students towards collaborative work, This leads us to claim the need for the teacher to ensure the perceptions that students have, and apply specific strategies.

This work describes an academic experience of the flipped classroom implemented as a strategy in the subject of Promotion, given to students of the second semester of Computer Engineering, of the University of Guadalajara. The main purpose was to promote the consumption and production of educational resources. The application of a didactic strategy divided into three moments was planned: classroom inverted with resources proposed by the teacher, based on the student's learning styles; participation of students in the creation of teaching resources; and finally, the evaluation from a descriptive study to a sample of 24 subjects. During the study, a Likert-type questionnaire was initially applied, organized around the methodological perception related to learning, the teacher-student interaction, student-student, learning rhythms, collaboration, problem solving, motivation and prosuming attitude. The results highlight that 88% agree on the methodology and personalization of learning rhythms; 92% state that the strategy allowed them to improve their learning and communication skills; for the previous thing one deduces a greater interaction between them and the professor, which developed his critical thought and abilities to solve problems; strategies for creating and disseminating content could be integrated; the student's motivation to collaborate and check the constructivist principle of learning by doing was increased. The application of active didactic models requires the conformation of learning environments under the principles of the learner's style and integrating their interests for the development of their competences.