A key aspect of the effective supervision of PhD research is the supervisor-student relationship. This interaction is affected by the characteristics and needs of students and institutional conditions, as well as the skills, attitudes, and roles of supervisors and their supervisory styles. When supervision is carried out at a distance, it entails an additional challenge, mainly concerning interaction. The purpose of this study is to improve the research process, supervision, and design of virtual environments in order to support this supervision. The study identifies the supervisory relationships that affect doctoral research conducted at a distance from the student’s academic institution. It also describes how students and their supervisors perceived the characteristics of supervision and the skills and attitudes students perceived in and expected from their supervisors. For data collection, semistructured interviews were used. The results indicate important differences between supervisors’ perceptions concerning their own role and students’ needs regarding supervision, and they demonstrate the importance of attending to student needs and, on the part of supervisors, exercising responsibility in the development of research competencies in students, as is the case of independence of criteria and autonomy.

The online social networks (OSN) have meant a transformation in the way of communicating and relating with people, and have reached a certain presence in the educational field, being used as an environment for collaborative work, alternative means of communication, learning of languages, platform or LMS for virtual training, and for tutoring and advising students. Adolescents and young people handle the OSN as preferred means for their communication and interaction, to extend their relationships, to locate and demand information, as an element of fun, as a means of coexistence and for the creation of new communication languages. For all these actions, the purpose of our study is to know and analyze the degree of addiction that young people and adolescents from different Latin American countries have towards OSN. For this, the scale of Sahin (2018) called “Social Media Addiction Scale-Student Form” (SMAS-SF) was adapted and was answered by 3223 young people from Chile, Colombia, Spain, Mexico, Peru and the Dominican Republic. As results obtained, significant differences are observed among young people and adolescents from the different countries surveyed, and they also show strong signs that in their opinion they are not addicted to them.

Agency, understood as the capacity for control and decision-making over action, is a concept that has been studied from various perspectives and traditions. Within the context of Higher Education—agency for learning or student agency—it provides an emancipatory perspective that goes beyond an individual outlook, addressing social interactions and the pedagogical context. Within the framework of a broader research project aiming to promote student agency through an emphasis on critical digital competence and open educational practices, this study conducts a systematic review of agency in Higher Education. The review aims to (1) conceptualize agency for learning in Higher Education, (2) explore educational practices used for its development, and (3) identify the needs related to its promotion. A total of 60 publications from 6 databases were analysed using EPPI-Reviewer and MAXQDA software. The results highlight the prevalence of motivational, sociocultural, and emancipatory approaches to the concept. The analysis of educational practices underscores partial characteristics in their implementation, such as collaborative practices, participation and co-creation of the curriculum with students, evaluation and feedback, as well as the facilitation of resources and support for students. Additionally, the study points out the scarcity of research on student agency in an integral manner and a lack of detailed documentation of practical experiences that allow for more integral, multidisciplinary, and practical approaches.

Although it is considered that open educational resources offer vast pedagogical opportunities for any educational context, there have been only few studies so far that have linked their use or application in the field of research training, and even less works that have addressed their quality assurance for that context. As part of an inter-institutional project, the main aim of this article is the collaborative selection and evaluation of appropriate educational resources for research training. The mixed method approach of the article includes needs’ analysis of researchers in training through questionnaires and interviews. This was the starting point for the collaborative evaluation of educational resources using the agreed common criteria derived from the Learning Object Review Instrument (LORI) evaluation instrument. This article suggests recommendations regarding the collaborative evaluation of educational resources and the use of LORI, and suggestions for creators of educational resources for research training to facilitate the quality assurance of their materials. A website is being developed to bind together the resources that have met the quality criteria established in collaborative evaluation.

This document presents a Decision Support System (DSS) aimed at small livestock farmers who have not made use of Information Technologies (IT) in their production systems. The DSS was built based on the finite difference equations of a simulation model in System Dynamics in whose definition the beneficiaries participated and also served as a base for the development of a serious video game. The DSS and the Serious video game is supported in a Web and Mobile Architecture. The simulation model and the serious video game are used as support tools in the training given to users to learn how to use the DSS. These three tools are the result of a doctoral research project, which used two methodologies during its execution: Design and Development Research and the Case Studies methodology. The tools were applied in an appropriation strategy with livestock farmers of the department of Santander in Colombia, where resistance to change and cultural attachment causes a low adoption of technology. The inclusion of gamification elements helps the user to understand the connection of these elements and their processes in a real farm, know the large volume of data managed by the DSS, enhance the process by making it more fun, improve the learning curve and provide useful data for tracking the use of the DSS. 16 months after the end of the training, the DSS has more than 13000 reported records about the activities of the farmers in their farms.

There is low adoption of Information Technologies (IT) in the administration of small bovine production systems which causes that most decisions are made based on the experience of the administrators and not based on data. This study proposes a methodological strategy to improve the adoption and appropriation of a Decision Support System (DSS) in the aforementioned kind of systems. The strategy includes gamification elements in the training supported in three IT tools, which help with the understanding of the connection between the tools. The tools are a simulation model, a serious video game, and the DSS. The design and development of the strategy used Design and Development Research and Case Study, System Dynamics to develop the simulation model and a Rational Unified Process to develop the serious video game and the DSS. The methodology was implemented in Santander, Colombia with informative sessions and working with producers in aided simulated environments with the goal of getting participants to use the proposed tools in their environments in a voluntary, autonomous, lasting way. Results showed the impact of the ludic and pedagogical components for the appropriation of the technology. 22 months after finishing the aided sessions 34% of the farmers show appropriation of the DSS and use it on their farms.