By immersing learners in a playful, interactive, and engaging experience, Educational Escape Rooms (EERs) have been found to enhance learners’ motivation, help them to develop 21st century skills, and improve knowledge acquisition. As research into EERs is still in a preliminary phase, no unified framework about how to design them has been established yet. Additionally, existing frameworks rarely validate the quality and efficacy of the frameworks themselves in terms of usability and usefulness. Therefore, the present paper proposes Room2Educ8, a learner-centred framework for EER design that follows Design Thinking principles. It provides detailed heuristics for empathising with learners, defining learning objectives and constraints, adding narrative, designing puzzles, briefing and debriefing participants, prototyping and playtesting, documenting the whole process, and evaluating the EER experience. A mixed-methods internal validation study based on Instructional Design model validation was conducted with 104 postgraduate students between 2018–2022 to assess the framework’s integrity and use. The study findings suggest that Room2Educ8 can be proposed as a valid tool for developing a wide range of EER types that cover a variety of topics. Its well-described and practical steps make it appropriate for educators regardless of a lack of prior experience in EER design.

The COVID-19 pandemic further outlined the importance of global healthcare services provisioning for diagnosing and treating patients who tend to travel and live for large periods away from home and can be anywhere at any given time. Advances in technology enable healthcare practitioners to access critical data regarding a person’s health status to provide better services. Medical data are sensitive in nature, and therefore, a reliable mechanism should ensure that only authorized entities can access data when needed. This paper, through a layered consideration of a Globalized Healthcare Provisioning Ecosystem (GHPE), reveals the interdependencies among its major components and suggests a necessary abstraction to identify requirements for the design of an access control suitable for the ecosystem. These requirements are imposed by the nature of the medical data as well as by the newly introduced potentials of Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) devices. As a result, an attribute-based access control framework is proposed aiming to provide prompt and secure access to medical data globally by utilizing state-of-the-art technologies and standards, including Next-Generation Access Control (NGAC), blockchain and smart contracts. Three types of smart contracts are proposed that enable access control to implement attribute and policy stores where policy classes and attributes are decentralized and immutable. In addition, the usage of blockchain-based distributed identities allows patients to be in control of access to their medical data and also enables healthcare service providers to access medical data promptly and reliably through the proposed access control framework. The qualitative characteristics of the proposed approach toward a decentralized and patient-centric access control in GHPE are demonstrated and discussed based on an application paradigm.