The aim of this paper is two-fold: firstly, to provide an overview of emerging digital practices that support collaborative learning, competency development, and digital literacy for student-centered learning environments in higher education during the rapid digital transition caused by pandemic-related lockdowns across the world, and secondly, to analyze and discuss how systematic reviews of generalized themes and trends can be combined with contextualized experiences and the lessons learned from the Covid-19 crisis to inform the digital transformation of higher education, with a particular focus on bridging the gap between campus-based teaching and online learning and on the identification of the digital competencies that teachers and students must acquire during the continuing shift into a ‘new normal’ for post-pandemic educational practices. This study was motivated by questions and findings emerging from an early reactive case study conducted by three of this paper’s co-authors (Lyngdorf et al., 2021a). By reviewing the full texts of 18 articles, this study provides a systematic literature review which maps the general landscape of the online, hybrid, and blended digital practices applied in existing student-centered learning environments in higher education since the onset of the pandemic. Furthermore, this mapping is used to revisit data and findings from the earlier reactive study of emerging digital practices in a specific problem- and project-based learning (PBL) environment. This study’s findings highlight critical factors and barriers related to emerging practices which support students’ interactions with teachers, content, and each other, as well as the emerging competencies that these practices will require. The paper concludes with a discussion of the main findings and their implications for further research and practice.

Children with cancer experience fragmented school attendance during treatment. Telepresence robots that connect them with school during treatment periods were explored through an intervention involving participant observation followed by semi‐structured interviews from 2020–22 with children with cancer, their class teachers, and classmates. We used an abductive approach, inspired by the Agential Realism theory and Situational Analysis. The use of telepresence robots in education enables hospitalized children to actively participate in real‐time social activities with their classmates. However, consistent monitoring is necessary to ensure the success of this integration process as the classmates can lose interest in providing support to a child with cancer.

Contribution: This article contributes to the literature surrounding first-year engineering students’ academic well-being by proposing a conceptual framework guiding an understanding of supportive sources that foster students’ academic well-being. A survey was designed and tested accordingly, and four factors that contribute to students’ academic well-being were identified to inspire the improvement of a future course and curriculum design. Background: Prior research has pointed out that students’ academic well-being has a significant impact on their persistence in their current study, learning experience, academic achievement, and competence development. However, limited studies have explored first-year engineering students’ academic well-being and supportive factors in the field of engineering higher education. To support engineering students to become agentic professionals, it is meaningful to pay close attention to their academic well-being and help them to become purposeful learners at an early stage of their professional development. Research Question: 1) How can an instrument be developed and validated to characterize the sources of students’ academic well-being in a project-based learning approaches (PBL) context? 2) What sources could foster students’ academic well-being in a PBL context? Are there significant differences in age, gender, and discipline as a function of sources of academic well-being? Methodology: With the guidance of the conceptual framework with the domains of internal and external sources, a survey was designed based on a literature review and conducted in a PBL environment. The survey’s content validity, construct validity, and reliability were tested using expert review, a pilot study, exploratory factor analysis (EFA), and Cronbach’s alpha. Findings: Supportive sources fostering students’ academic well-being were reported in the factors of personal values, agentic action, interactions within the learning environment, and external support. Comparisons between gender, age, and discipline verified the different impacts of the four factors on fostering academic well-being.

As educational service robots become increasingly accessible, the demand for methodologies that generate knowledge on r-learning applicable to real world learning environments equally increases. This paper proposes a participatory design framework for involving users in the development of robot-supported didactic designs and discusses its applicability to existing educational contexts on the basis of a case study on the implementation and use of the therapeutic robot seal Paro at a school for children with an autism diagnosis.