Higher Education in the Digital Age: Enhancing Learning, Critical Thinking, and Quality

Dear Colleagues,

Digital technologies are now embedded in nearly every aspect of higher education, from curriculum design and teaching practices to assessment, feedback, and student support, and all of these contribute to the quality of programme delivery. At the heart of this Special Issue are critical thinking and educational quality: we ask how digital technology can be fashioned into learning designs and educational environments to cultivate students’ critical inquiry, disciplinary judgement, and demonstrably high-quality learning outcomes. We spotlight how higher education, with its distinctive disciplines, pedagogies, and quality cultures, can uniquely contribute to sustaining and evidencing quality while developing students’ capacity for critical analysis.

This Special Issue, “Higher Education in the Digital Age: Enhancing Learning, Critical Thinking, and Quality”, invites contributions that advance conceptual, empirical, and methodological understandings of how to define, scaffold, teach, and assess critical thinking and educational quality in contemporary higher education. We welcome work that goes beyond mere description and instead offers robust evidence, theoretical insight, and transferable implications for educational practice and policy. We particularly encourage studies that operationalize these constructs; develop or validate measures and frameworks for critical thinking and quality; investigate learning design principles and assessment/feedback practices that scaffold formation (bildung), motivation, and critical inquiry; and evaluate institutional arrangements that strengthen quality enhancement across contexts.

We encourage manuscripts that offer rigorous, critical analysis of what digital transformation means for the quality of higher education—pedagogically, institutionally, and ethically; studies that explore how digital environments influence student learning and the development and assessment of critical thinking; and the ways institutions define, support, evidence, and evaluate educational quality. Contributions may also examine unintended consequences—such as inequities, workload pressures, academic integrity dilemmas, or tensions between innovation and standardisation—while proposing grounded strategies for improvement with clear implications for quality and critical thinking.

Suggested themes include (but are not limited to) the following:

• Designing learning for deep understanding, engagement, and persistence in digital/hybrid contexts;
• Critical thinking: Conceptualizations, teaching approaches, and assessment practices;
• Assessment and feedback (for learning) in technology-enhanced learning (including authentic assessment);
• Quality work promoting academic integrity, AI literacy, and professional digital competence;
• Student agency, belonging, inclusion, and accessibility in digitally mediated learning;
• Academic integrity, trust, and the redesign of assessment in the digital age;
• Faculty roles, professional learning, and instructional design capacity;
• Cross-disciplinary, cross-institutional, and cross-national comparisons;
• Methodological innovations for studying learning and quality in complex digital ecologies.

We welcome empirical studies (quantitative, qualitative, mixed-methods), design-based research, systematic/scoping reviews, theoretical and conceptual analyses, and methodological papers that strengthen how the field investigates learning, critical thinking, and quality. Contributions that navigate the tensions between innovation and quality—and between critique and innovation—are encouraged, and authors are expected to make the relevance of their findings clear for higher education practice, educational leadership, and future research.

Please note that the scope of this Special Issue is strictly limited to higher education contexts (universities, colleges, and continuing professional education). Studies focusing on primary or secondary education (K-12) or early childhood education fall outside the remit of this collection and will not be considered.

We invite researchers, scholars of teaching and learning, and interdisciplinary teams to contribute work that helps higher education move from rapid digital adoption toward intentional, evidence-driven, and equitable improvement—enhancing learning, cultivating critical thinkers, and sustaining high-quality educational experiences.

Important Dates

• Full manuscript submission deadline: 15 August 2026
• Revisions: Rolling/as requested by the editorial process
• Expected final decisions: September 2026

Publication: Continuous (articles published as soon as accepted).

References

Bates, A. W. (2022). Teaching in a digital age: Guidelines for designing teaching and learning (3rd ed.). Tony Bates Associates Ltd.

Bearman, M., Ryan, J., & Ajjawi, R. (2023). Discourses of artificial intelligence in higher education: A critical literature review. Higher Education, 86(2), 369–385. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10734-022-00937-2

Harvey, L., & Green, D. (1993). Defining quality. Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education, 18(1), 9–34. https://doi.org/10.1080/0260293930180102

Harrison, R., Meyer, L., Rawstorne, P., Razee, H., Chitkara, U., Mears, S., & Balasooriya, C. (2022). Evaluating and enhancing quality in higher education teaching practice: A meta-review. Studies in Higher Education, 47(1), 80–96. https://doi.org/10.1080/03075079.2020.1730315

Henderson, M., Selwyn, N., & Aston, R. (2017). What works and why? Student perceptions of “useful” digital technology in university teaching and learning. Studies in Higher Education, 42(8), 1567–1579. https://doi.org/10.1080/03075079.2015.1007946

Kirkwood, A., & Price, L. (2014). Technology-enhanced learning and teaching in higher education: What is “enhanced” and how do we know? A critical literature review. Learning, Media and Technology, 39(1), 6–36. https://doi.org/10.1080/17439884.2013.770404

Laurillard, D. (2012). Teaching as a design science: Building pedagogical patterns for learning and technology. Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203125083

McGrath, C., Farazouli, A., & Cerratto-Pargman, T. (2024). Generative AI chatbots in higher education: A review of an emerging research area. Higher Education. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10734-024-01288-w

Selwyn, N. (2021). Education and technology: Key issues and debates (3rd ed.). Bloomsbury Academic.

UNESCO. (2023). Guidance for generative AI in education and research. UNESCO.

Prof. Dr. Trine Fossland
Prof. Dr. Mike Joy
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 250 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for assessment.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a double-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Education Sciences is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 1800 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

• higher education
• digital transformation
• educational quality
• learning design
• critical thinking
• technology-enhanced learning
• assessment and feedback
• academic integrity
• AI literacy
• professional digital competence