Information Technology in the Search for Employment

Employability is one of the main concerns of the citizens of developed countries. Over the last 10 years, it has become popular to use technology to find employment and better career opportunities. Currently, there are many technology-powered tools available which offer their users (candidates and companies) the possibility of finding the best job opportunities/employees. However, technology is becoming increasingly advanced and current employment-oriented websites must keep up with those standards. Thanks to the computing and information processing capabilities provided by artificial intelligence, today's websites are not mere directories of jobs and candidates; instead, they make it possible to automatically filter search results according to the characteristics of candidates and jobs. This chapter presents a review of state-of-the-art technologies aimed at improving employability and analyzes the technological advances in this sector.

Architectural View of an App for Walking Through a City in a Safe Way

This chapter offers a general review of the presence of the risks present in today's society and its impact on citizens' daily lives as well as the challenge it represents for the authorities in their desire to turn their cities into smart cities and proposes the use of Safe Paths, a mobile application focused on risk prevention based on social collaboration to identify dangerous areas and give alerts based on their users' location and the risks around to them. It also describes the architecture used by Safe Paths, the sketches used in its development, and finally shows the interface it provides to the end-user.

App Design and Implementation for Learning Human Anatomy Through Virtual and Augmented Reality

The influence of augmented reality (RA) and virtual reality (RV) techniques is analyzed in the process of teaching-learning for the human anatomy subject, in particular in health science students. For this purpose, two applications have been designed for mobile devices and virtual reality glasses with the purpose of incorporating these techniques in teaching for the study of human anatomy to facilitate the students with better learning of anatomical body contents through these technological procedures. In this way it is intended to achieve a better transmission of knowledge to students in an effective, visual, interactive, and close way. The authors believe that these technological tools constitute an excellent complementary medium to the traditional atlases, facilitating the learning of the anatomical structures.

Training on Social Entrepreneurship

Social Seducement is an Erasmus+ project aimed to improve the social inclusiveness of adults in risks of social exclusion by training them in the social economy. To do it, the gamified learning tool Social PlaNet was developed, trying to offer an efficient and attractive training plan on social economy entrepreneurship. This particular kind of economy brings several benefits to this target group, since it develops the action to benefit the local community and is usually run in groups. Moreover, the fact of training in entrepreneurship also provides long-term unemployed people to own their possibilities of work and, that way, to feel included in society again. In this chapter, an overview of the project and its outcomes are presented.

RoboSTEAM Project

Digital society demands professionals prepared for the current landscape. It is necessary to teach current students how to employ and solve problems related to this constantly changing context. This requires new learning approaches that facilitate developing computational thinking skills by learning programming and applying STEAM disciplines. However, integrating STEAM and developing such skills is not easy in current educational programs. RoboSTEAM project is an Erasmus KA2 project that propose the application of challenge-based learning methodologies combined with the use of robots and physical devices in order help learners to develop computational thinking in pre-university education environments. This chapter describes the project proposal, partners involved, activities, and outcomes and initial results obtained.

Erasmus+ Educational Projects on eLearning and Related Methodologies

Collecting data from Erasmus+ projects to detect those that have been identified as good practice or success story could be very useful in order to help teachers to define successful projects in a particular field. To compile projects of interest, the Erasmus+ Project Results Platform is available, which has a database with very useful information to locate educational projects that have been funded by the European Union. The advantage of using this tool is that it has a search engine that allows anyone to look up for keywords. Moreover, it permits to define different criteria so as to identify good practices projects that could serve as a reference in order to find useful parameters to improve the teaching process. This chapter presents the main data collected from educational projects that are related to eLearning and related methodologies in the aforementioned platform. It also defines which ones will be selected so as to be able to undertake an adequate analysis that allows the definition of a methodological guide to be carried out.

Impact of the COVID-19 on Higher Education

The COVID-19 outbreak has a considerable impact on all business domains worldwide, almost with negative consequences. The digital transformation was already a requirement for all governments and institutions that this pandemic has accelerated to solve the confinement and the limitations to work and share the same spaces. Face-to-face higher education institutions moved towards an urgent and unplanned online teaching. After having closed one of the processes that has had the most significant impact on universities, the time has come to reflect and draw conclusions that will serve to face these institutions' future. A crisis always represents risks but also opportunities to change from a disruptive situation. This chapter reflects universities' futures from a strengths-weaknesses-opportunities-threats approach with the perspective of the experiences lived during the end of the 2019-2020 academic year by some face-to-face universities in Spain.

Mobile Pedestrian Navigation and Augmented Reality in the Virtualization of the Territory

Establishing the meanings and relationships that exist between the creation of heritage educational content of applications with elements of mobile pedestrian navigation and mobile augmented reality and learning processes through mobile devices is the objective of this research. From this portable and mobile context, a teaching process linked to territorial information on the architectural and historical heritage corresponding to the cities of Salamanca (Spain) and Santiago (Chile) has been developed, proving its educational effectiveness. Methodologically, the research focuses on two areas: the educational design of recourses for learning through augmented reality and mobile pedestrian navigation on heritage contents and the determination of the modes of understanding and educational effectiveness of the app created in relation to other traditional learning tools. In this way, the construction of a patrimonial thematic unit has been developed with the determination of the scope of this tool in the mobile learning processes considering the processes of identity and local culture.

A Review and Comparative Study of Teacher's Digital Competence Frameworks

The current technological revolution has reached all social classes, and its educative use by teachers has gone noticed. This chapter provides a comprehensive overview of the six main international frameworks published from 2010 until now. The first objective of this work is to analyze these frameworks' contributions to understanding the development of this competence. The second objective is to determine whether there are any differences between these frameworks through strengths-weaknesses-opportunities-threats (SWOT) analysis. The main aim is to make it easier to integrate an assessment digital competence framework for teachers in other regions of the world that do not have their own framework. The analysis indicates that the six frames have coincidences and nuances in understanding the development of digital competence. This study shows that DigComp is subject to create consensus at the European level about the digital competence components, which can also serve as a conceptual reference model for other countries o educational institutions.

Social Media in Higher Education

The technological revolution of the past two decades has changed higher education; technology use in higher education, particularly with respect to the implementation of social media, has yet to reach the expected potential. Technology offers higher education students and faculty an array of options to learn, network, stay informed and connected; however, social media use comes with risks and consequences. Personal use of digital technologies for social media communication is one thing; social media use by professors for communication with students is another. Can social media be used in higher education to improve learning through student and faculty collaboration? Are there less than desirable results in the interaction of social media and higher education?