Technology Support in Higher Education and IT Impact on Engagement with Students

Dear Colleagues,

COVID-19 has generated a major shake-up in education around the world, forcing educational institutions to face challenges never seen before. Focusing on the university environment, universities found that they suddenly had to move all their teaching, as well as many other tasks that could no longer be carried out face to face, to a virtual format. Subsequently, they gradually began to combine hybrid face-to-face and virtual strategies.

Throughout this process, ICTs have played a fundamental role. As far as possible, they have made it possible to replace face-to-face attendance, providing continuity to many of the tasks that were normally done face to face before the pandemic, such as classes, tutorials, management or coordination. In fact, technological tools have made it possible to maintain a high level of contact with students, with the idea of maintaining their commitment to the organization.

This emergency has led to changes in the roles of teachers and students. The latter have had to exercise their digital competence and assume a more active and co-responsible role in the learning process itself.

Given this context, this Special Issue aims to create a collection of papers related to the use of technology in higher education and its impact on student engagement. The idea is to build a community of authors and readers to discuss the latest research and develop innovative training ideas, solutions, and lines of research in the field of the use of ICT in higher education and its influence on student engagement.

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

• Strategies for fostering student engagement in the integrated use of ICTs in higher education;
• Design of assessment methods using ICTs to support self-regulated learning processes and autonomy;
• Analysis of the factors involved in the development of teachers' and students' digital competence in order to achieve the integration of ICTs in training processes;
• Organizational development and structural factors that may affect student engagement in the use of ICTs;
• Lessons learned from emergency teaching about students' attitudes and engagement with their own learning process.

(*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. Òscar Flores
Dr. Isabel del-Arco Bravo
Dr. Anabel Ramos-Pla
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 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

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.

• ICTs
• higher education
• student engagement
• universities
• teaching
• management