Innovation and Digital Transformation in Teaching Practice in Higher Education

Dear Colleagues,

The COVID-19 pandemic has sent shockwaves through education around the world, forcing educational institutions to face all sorts of challenges, many of which have never been seen before. Focusing on the university level, these institutions were forced to move all their teaching, as well as many other tasks, to a virtual format. Subsequently, they gradually began to combine hybrid strategies, between face-to-face and virtual.

Throughout this process, digital technologies have played a fundamental role. Although they have not been able to replace the value of face-to-face meetings in all dimensions, thanks to them it has been possible to give continuity to many of the teaching tasks that were normally done face-to-face before 2020. 

At present, the crisis caused by the COVID-19 pandemic is increasingly being assimilated by global education systems. Alongside this, face-to-face training activities have been re-establishing themselves in much of the world. However, many of these digital innovations in teaching have generated substantive educational and institutional transformations that are affecting both the methods of designing teaching in higher education, as well as the way of understanding university institutions in the present and future.

Given this scenario, this Special Issue aims to bring together a set of international contributions that (1) focus precisely on publicizing these innovations and analyze their implementation, the role of digital technologies, and their potential for sustainability, (2) and that, in general, allow the academic community and society to understand the scope of these transformations and digital innovations in the configuration of the university of the present and the future.

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to, the following aspects:

• Innovative teaching practices with digital technologies in higher education;
• Digital capitalism in higher education;
• Critical perspectives about innovative teaching with digital technologies in higher education;
• Strategies for fostering student engagement in the integrated use of ICTs in higher education;
• Promotion of digital platforms BigTech and education privatization in higher education;
• Critical digital literacies in higher education with a focus in education transformation and digital education;
• Sustainability of teaching innovations in higher education;
• Design of assessment methods using ICTs to support self-regulated learning processes and autonomy;
• Analysis of the factors that may affect student engagement in the use of digital technologies;
• Lessons learned from emergency teaching about students' attitudes and engagement with their own learning process in higher education;
• Conditions to build fair data cultures in the teaching in the teaching practices at the university;
• Use of algorithmic education and AI in innovative teaching in higher education.

(*Contributions have to follow one of the three categories of papers (article, conceptual paper or review) of the journal and address the topic of the Special Issue.)

Dr. Pablo Rivera-Vargas
Dr. Lluís Parcerisa
Guest Editors

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