Online and Ubiquitous Training, Mobile Technology in Education and Sustainability

Dear Colleagues,

At the World Education Forum 2015, the global community agreed to launch ‘Education 2030: the Incheon Declaration and Framework for Action’, which seeks to ensure access to basic education for all (UNESCO, 2015). That same year, the international community adopted the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), a set of 17 global goals and 169 targets with the unifying thread throughout of commitment to ending poverty (United Nations, 2015).

Sustainable Development Goal 4 (SDG4), which expands on the Education for All goals and the education-related Millennium Development Goals, focuses on the education needs of a sustainable society and exhorts the global community to ‘Ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all’ (United Nations, 2015).

ICT is viewed as a critical mechanism that can improve access to education and address issues relating to inclusion, equity and quality. ICT can also play a transformative role in raising public awareness and reducing the cost of extending new services to a wide audience. For the SDG4 targets to be achieved by the year 2030, it is necessary to leverage existing accessible technologies. Concomitantly, it has been predicted that the traditional approaches to using technologies will not be adequate for achieving the universal goals by 2030. Therefore, new, holistic approaches to ICT integration are required (UNESCO, 2015; 2016).

All these considerations guide the proposal of this monograph, which aims to collect studies and research, as well as theoretical contributions, which exemplify and inform good educational practices with ICT for a sustainable future.

Scientific contributions will be accepted, referred to four priority areas for the use of ICT towards achieving SDG4 and Education 2030:

1. Mobile technology for transforming and expanding Secondary Education, Technical and Vocational Education and Training and Higher Education.
2. ICT-integrated transformative pedagogies and the use of smart mobile devices to promote collaborative learning and to extend learning spaces beyond traditional classroom contexts.
3. ICT for enhancing the competencies of girls, women and vulnerable groups to ensure that no one is left behind.
4. Digital Transformation and Sustainability: Gamification, Learning analytics, MOOCs, virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR), Social Computing, Big data, OER and open solutions, open social networks. and adaptive learning technologies in online learning.

Prof. Esteban Vázquez-Cano
Prof. Eloy López Meneses
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 single-anonymized peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Sustainability is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly 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 2400 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.