This study examines educators’ perceptions of artificial intelligence (AI) in educational settings, focusing on their familiarity with AI tools, integration into teaching practices, professional development needs, the influence of institutional policies, and impacts on mental health. Survey responses from 353 educators across various levels and countries revealed that 92% of respondents are familiar with AI, utilizing it to enhance teaching efficiency and streamline administrative tasks. Notably, many educators reported students using AI tools like ChatGPT for assignments, prompting adaptations in teaching methods to promote critical thinking and reduce dependency. Some educators saw AI’s potential to reduce stress through automation but others raised concerns about increased anxiety and social isolation from reduced interpersonal interactions. This study highlights a gap in institutional AI policies, leading some educators to establish their own guidelines, particularly for matters such as data privacy and plagiarism. Furthermore, respondents identified a significant need for professional development focused on AI literacy and ethical considerations. This study’s findings suggest the necessity for longitudinal studies to explore the long-term effects of AI on educational outcomes and mental health and underscore the importance of incorporating student perspectives for a thorough understanding of AI’s role in education.

As participation in electronic sports (esports) continues to expand globally, colleges and universities are considering how such competitive video gaming might impact recruitment, retention, and the overall student engagement experience. This mixed-methods study focuses on the perceptions of college students in both the United States and Italy regarding the esports phenomenon. A compilation of the research findings from two case studies compared and contrasted themes associated with the benefits and risks to college students participating in esports. The findings highlighted the notion that even during challenging times such as the COVID-19 pandemic, the college students in this study were still driven to invest their time in esports play. However, the risks such as those of addiction, health impairment, and social isolation may outweigh the perceived benefits to game play. Included are critical considerations and policy recommendations for campus esports programs as well as future directions in research.

The use of information age technology favors pervasive communication exchanges and complex phenomenologies, which affect the production of knowledge and the permanent transformation of personalities and contexts, not always with a view to prosocial empowerment of differences. From the analysis of the liquid socio–psycho–educational frames explored in the research activated at the University of Salerno, the permanent need for a widespread media education emerges, to be rooted in a lifelong learning vision to achieve systemic inclusiveness. This is the basis of the epistemology of the existential design model Flipped Inclusion, promoted and tested at the University of Salerno, whose complex idiomatic phrase constitutes the integrated and complex synthesis of the multi-perspective and multimodal approach pursued by the model. In the exploratory–descriptive–transformative research underway since 2014, through blended learning, complex blended learning and with formal, non-formal and informal contexts, the design–organizational, algorithmic–computational architecture of flipped inclusion is experimented upon. The trend of data since 2014 confirms the educational value of the model, due to the positive impact relating to inclusiveness on personal styles and social contexts, hence the intention to continue research on larger samples.

In the post-modern glocal society, with an economy of continuous training generated by a trans-human technological expansion, we are witnessing an informative consumerism and a capitalism of knowledge that produces a socio-economic co-evolution. The complex idiomatic locution flipped inclusion, introduced in the descriptive-transformative experimental research at the University of Salerno from 2014, crosses, declines, and transposes the concept of inclusion as a social construct in an ecological-systemic perspective and the logic of flipped learning in a systemic learning perspective – learning organization, learning of society, lifelong learning.

This chapter analyzes aspects of the information and communication society, which affirm the power of knowledge in the continuous recognition and reinterpretation of signs. Deviant aspects of technology use related to cognitive capitalism and consumer needs that are expressed in knowledge are addressed and new forms of educational emergencies are outlined. The flipped inclusion model is based on epistemological constructs, which characterize the cross-media society and on the value of the circular economy, understood as self-regenerative, through investments in circular education as a permanent re-education process. The research, carried out in Italy, proposes an existential design model, focused on the perspectives of a permanent and inclusive system of learning. The aim of the research was to highlight how a trans-educational pedagogical-didactic model formed personalities with a plural-prosocial identity and favored the processes of co-management and the co-construction of inclusive contexts.

Starting from the scenarios of the knowledge economy and the Europe 2020 Strategy, the flipped inclusion model is outlined in a complex blended learning modality, within a built in trajectory that endorses the phenomenal world of virtual and real reality, highlighting the links between relational, learning and economic-cultural innovation processes. In FI, the use of multimedia technologies adopted according to a systemic logic from microto macro group processes, expanding opportunities for access to information and using multiple learning methods and environments, return an offer more articulated and extensive training that generates a synoptic view of the cognitive contents. The whole, influencing the learning, cognitive and attribution styles involved, aims to contribute to the well-being, to the maintaining and progressing humanity itself, with the aim of forming individual profiles capable of promoting communities that embody the inclusive value of differences, thus generating into a smart, sustainable and inclusive global growth engine.