Cultural Heritage for Sustainable Education Amidst Digitalisation

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

This is an interesting and broad piece of research and I commend you for a thorough literature review! Here are my suggestions for improving the manuscript:

1. Provide a reference(s) to support your statement on lines 48-49,

2. Provide concrete examples to support your statement on lines 110-111,

3. Remove final paragraph ahead of Section 2(lines 153-157),

4. Expand on methodology section starting with lines 178-182 - how did you collect the quantitative data - face-to-face or online? How was your sample selected? Did you do follow-up requests to provide data?

5. You used qualitative content analysis - did you follow the recommendations from a known author?

6. I suggest comparing your results from Table 1 with that of industry leaders across the EU. What do the believe are the top 3-5 competences?, and

7. For your statement on lines 252-254, provide evidence that teachers are modifying their classroom instruction to include more technology. 

I only found minor punctuation errors on lines 88, 125,171 & 387. On line 162, you use STUDY twice in the same sentence, replace one with a different word. On line 168 replace qualitative with quantitative. I suggest you reword lines 170 - 172 so it is one, complete sentence. ".....characteristics of a large sample [30, 31], and the need to collect a large amount of quantitative data [32,33]."

Author Response

Dear Reviewer,

Thank you for your suggestions, which aim at strengthening our article. We found every single suggestion useful and therefore, we made an effort to implement all suggested changes (please see a list below). In the journal’s guidance, there was a note, asking us to highlight our changes and revisions in the analysis. However, with the additions of news parts; extensive editing throughout the script; and proofreading at the end, almost every single line had to be highlighted. Therefore, instead of highlighting changes, we decided to submit a table with thorough and detailed explanations of what we did.

Once again, thank you very much for accepting to evaluate our revised work. If any other changes are needed, we are more than happy to work on the paper.

We are much obliged for your kind input.

Cordially,

Reviewer 2 Report

Dear Authors, 

key tables must be improved to be visible and presented clearly. Until this, I

can't recommend it for publishing.

Moreover, you write a scientific work, not a best-seller. Try to avoid

sentences that do not say much to understand your work. 

Comments for author File: Comments.pdf

Author Response

Dear Reviewer,

Thank you for your suggestions, which aim at strengthening our article. We found every single suggestion useful and therefore, we made an effort to implement all suggested changes (please find table below). In the journal’s guidance, there was a note, asking us to highlight our changes and revisions in the analysis. However, with the additions of news parts; extensive editing throughout the script; and proofreading at the end, almost every single line had to be highlighted. Therefore, instead of highlighting changes, we decided to submit a table with thorough and detailed explanations of what we did.

Once again, thank you very much for accepting to evaluate our revised work. If any other changes are needed, we are more than happy to work on the paper.

We are much obliged for your kind input.

Cordially,

Reviewer 3 Report

Overall, I feel the article has good potential. However, in its present form, it cannot be acceptable for publication due to several issues, which I shall elucidate.

*  The abstract can be condensed and written more clearly. Please specifically state the two studies conducted, in addition to providing an overview of the results.

* Figure 1 - do the blue and grey arrows depict the same interaction? In that case, remove the blue arrows. If they are not the same, please explain what they depict.

* Between lines 35 and 45, it is essential to discuss the types of cultural heritage i.e. tangible and intangible.

* Between lines 46 and 59, several statements are made without citations. These are big claims, so citations are a must.

* What is ESD in line 53?

*  Lines 125 to 127 - This is a big claim. Please refer to the following studies on cultural heritage informatics:

Modrow, S., & Youngman, T. (2023). Theorizing Cultural Heritage Informatics as the Intersection of Heritage, Memory, and Information. Proceedings of the Association for Information Science and Technology, 60(1), 666-671.

Koya, K., & Chowdhury, G. (2020). Cultural heritage information practices and iSchools education for achieving sustainable development. Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology, 71(6), 696-710.

*  There should be more literature stating the relationship between digital skills, cultural heritage and sustainable development/education.

* Lines 145 to 148 - This claim needs more backing from the literature or should be avoided altogether until the results are presented and discussed.

* It is important you state the overall research aim and objectives towards the end of the literature review to clarify what research questions you are trying to address. 

Methodology:

* Was ethical approval sought from the authors' institutions? If so, please include a statement.

* Why were Cyprus, Lithuania and Italy chosen?

* Please attach the questionnaire as part of the appendices.

* How were the questionnaire responses analysed?

* Was informed consent sought from the participants?

* Why weren't the questionnaire respondents invited to participate in the interviews, as I would imagine they form a stakeholder category too?

* Were the interviews transcribed? Was a data analysis tool i.e. Nvivo utilised?

* Please explain in detail how the conversation/content analysis was applied - how was coding performed, when did code saturation occur, how were the themes defined, theme interpretation and consistency.

Results:

* Descriptive stats are well discussed.

* Section 3.2 and table 4 - How are you able to say there is a lack of awareness of tangible and intangible cultural heritage when options 5, 4 and 3 are the most selected for this part. 

* There needs to be some form of statistical testing to determine a statistically significant relationship, to come to these conclusions.

* It is not entirely clear from the findings section if all the results from the questionnaire and the interviews are discussed. Therefore, the conclusions cannot be vouched.

* Within the discussion section, it is good to see Kolb's learning cycle utilised for reflexivity in developing a novel framework, however, the data analysis and results section needs to be solidified first. Without substantial and verifiable results, a novel framework cannot be developed.

The article needs extensive editing and structuring to improve it's comprehensibility. Additionally, there are several instances of spelling errors that need to be corrected. 

Author Response

Dear Reviewer,

Thank you for your suggestions, which aim at strengthening our article. We found every single suggestion useful and therefore, we made an effort to implement all suggested changes (please find table below). In the journal’s guidance, there was a note, asking us to highlight our changes and revisions in the analysis. However, with the additions of news parts; extensive editing throughout the script; and proofreading at the end, almost every single line had to be highlighted. Therefore, instead of highlighting changes, we decided to submit a table with thorough and detailed explanations of what we did.

Once again, thank you very much for accepting to evaluate our revised work. If any other changes are needed, we are more than happy to work on the paper.

We are much obliged for your kind input.

Cordially,

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

I am pleased with the authors modifications to the original manuscript. My concerns were addressed and thoroughly explored. This piece is worthy of publication.

English language is easy to follow and understand. I only found minor errors, most of them were punctuation errors. 

Author Response

Dear Reviewer, 

Thank you ever so much for your guidance throughout the process. 

Cordially, 

Authors

Reviewer 2 Report

Dear Authors,

I can't recommend publishing, since there are a statement without any proof and obviously wrong statistical conclusion.  

Comments for author File: Comments.pdf

There are only a few comments in the file attached.

Author Response

Dear Reviewer,

Thank you ever so much for your valuable feedback. We really appreciate the time you took to write direct comments for revisions on our paper. Although we earlier conducted professional proofreading (and paid for it), your review enabled us to correct additional typos and discrepancies. We also changed digitization to digitilisation (as you suggested) on the graph and throughout the analysis. We also removed repetitive sentences, as you suggested.

The only suggestion we didn’t change concerns a sentence in the introduction, which aims at introducing the reader to cultural heritage. Although you suggested that the particular sentence may be unnecessary, we decided to keep it to enable 1^st time readers to formulate an understanding about the components of cultural heritage (tangible and intangible).

Moreover, concerning your comment on statistics (presented in section 3.1), it seems that the table (Table 1) supporting the analysis was wrong. In the actual script on the platform, the correct ‘Table 1’ is visible in the analysis. However, on the version where you added direct comments, Table 1 is the same with Table 2. We don’t know how this problem occurred, possibly during the transfer of infographics. But in any case, please let us apologise for this misunderstanding. We now have the correct Table 1 on the revised script, which presents all correct figures. We also added the actual figures in the analysis, to enhance the analysis further.

We also edited the analysis further and added another figure, explaining our coding process.

Also, kindly find the questionnaire attached. The journal's team will place it within the actual paper. But you can also find it here as an attachment. 

We remain at your disposal for any other changes you consider necessary.  

Thank you very much for your support.

Cordially,

Authors                   

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 3 Report

* The example provided between lines 126-132 is not relevant to the gist of the article. Please include a suitable example.

*The coding part of the data analysis is still not clear. Which criteria was used? Why did coding begin separately for every interview? For example https://images.app.goo.gl/8UwJUYQwEEmeZPrw6 for reference.

*Could you also confirm if the interviews were conducted in home languages (or English) and how was consistency in findings was achieved?

The article has been improved significantly, however, I suggest a further round of proofreading to improve readability.

Author Response

Dear Reviewer,

Thank you ever so much for your valuable feedback. We really appreciate the time you took to suggest specific changes and revisions.

Change 1

Comment: ‘The example provided between lines 126-132 is not relevant to the gist of the article. Please include a suitable example’.

Answer: you are absolutely right. This example is completely irrelevant. The you very much for suggesting it. It has been replaced with a revenant example and references as follows:

For example Borthwick et al. [51] and Kumar et al. [52] state that ‘[l]earners can down-load the necessary information or upload their content using a plethora of digital resources’. Web 2.0 tools (wikis, podcasts, blogs, and so on) enable learners to create material, collaborate with others, evaluate each other's work, and progress toward co-learning.

Change 2

Comment: ‘The coding part of the data analysis is still not clear. Which criteria was used? Why did coding begin separately for every interview?’.

Answer: many thanks for this comment, which aims at strengthening the analysis. The main codes were comprised by the competencies appearing in Table. Further explanation has been added, along with a new figure (similar to the example you have provided us with – many thanks for this).

Change 3

Many thanks for the comment on interviews (Could you also confirm if the interviews were conducted in home languages (or English) and how was consistency in findings was achieved?).

Answer: A relevant explanation has been added in the analysis, as follows:

The interviews were conducted in home languages, and translated into English (which is the projects official language) by the project designated translators.

We remain at your disposal for any other changes you consider necessary. 

Thank you very much for your support.

Cordially,

Authors

Round 3

Reviewer 2 Report

Dear Authors, 

If you declare that the Appendix is added, then the Appendix must be added. 

For now, I can't recommend the manuscript to be published.  

Comments for author File: Comments.pdf

Author Response

Dear Reviewer,

Many thanks for your valuable feedback and direct comments in the script. We conducted all the changes you suggested in the script – all of them were meaningful corrections, thank you.

Concerning the appendix, kindly note that we received a message from the Editorial office that the Appendix was formatted as Supplementary Material (not as Appendix), and it’s available.  Therefore, we removed an points referring to an appendix in the script.

We remain at your disposal for any other changes you consider necessary.  

Thank you very much for your guidance.  

Cordially,

Authors

Reviewer 3 Report

Thank you for the amendments following the feedback.

NA

Author Response

Dear Reviewer, 

Many thanks for your positive response. We will now conduct a final copy-edit and submit the final version. 

We really appreciate your contribution to the evaluation process. 

Cordially, 

Authors.