Increasingly, among international organizations concerned with unemployment rates and industry demands, there is an emphasis on the need to improve graduates’ employability skills and the transparency of mechanisms for their recognition. This research presents the Employability Skills Micro-credentialing (ESMC) methodology, designed under the EPICA Horizon 2020 (H2020) project and tested at three East African universities, and shows how it fosters pedagogical innovation and promotes employability skills integration and visibility. The methodology, supported by a competency-based ePortfolio and a digital micro-credentialing system, was evaluated using a mixed-method design, combining descriptive statistics and qualitative content analysis to capture complementary stakeholder perspectives. The study involved the participation of 13 lecturers, 169 students, and 24 employers. The results indicate that the ESMC methodology is a promising approach for supporting students in their transition from academia to the workplace. The implementation of the methodology and the involvement of employers entails rethinking educational practices and academic curricula to embed employability skills. It enables all actors to broaden their understanding of the relationship between higher education and the business sector and to sustain visibility, transparency, and reliability of the recognition process. These findings indicate that there are favourable conditions in the region for the adoption of the approach, which is a meaningful solution for the stakeholder community to address the skills gap.

Online feedback plays a key role in learning, but this requires that students engage with feedback. Some authors identify students’ perception of feedback as relevant to understanding engagement. To measure the effect that perceived feedback (specifically its valence) has upon engagement with feedback, a quasi-experimental study has been carried out between two groups of master’s students (191 students, 91.6% women, with a mean age of 30.6 years): a group in which students had the possibility to resubmit an assignment after feedback and another group in which students only received feedback at the end of the assignment. Results show there are no significant differences between both groups regarding the perception of the feedback. However, the results point to the importance of feedback valence perception in resubmission situation. In this situation, a significant relationship between emotional engagement and cognitive engagement with feedback was identified depending on how the feedback was perceived. The main conclusions are the need of incorporating opportunities for resubmission to promote engagement with feedback, the relevance of the perception of feedback, and the role of emotional engagement plays in relation to cognitive engagement with feedback.

Research on feedback has focused more on generating feedback rather than on how students use it and implement it; that is, what type of cognitive, metacognitive or affective activity students engage in once they have received feedback. In order to visualize feedback use and implementation, a quasi-experimental study was carried out. Students were randomly assigned to four conditions, in respect of the type of feedback (corrective, epistemic-questioning, suggestive and epistemic + suggestive). This research provides evidence of how students use and implement feedback in online collaborative writing. Findings show that when students received epistemic + suggestive feedback, they engaged in more cognitive and metacognitive activities. With regard to implementation, students who received epistemic + suggestive feedback obtained better final marks. This study highlights the importance of metacognitive activities in online learning, as they play a key role in the implementation of feedback.

The progressive shift from a transmissive to a competence-based approach emphasises the need to design new models and tools for competence assessment. In order to address this need, this study, firstly, introduces the assessment model for digital competence in primary and secondary schools developed within the H2020 CRISS project. The Competence Assessment Model (CAM) (1) embraces the integration pedagogy approach in which competences are embedded within the curriculum and (2) provides competence assessment scenarios (CAS). Secondly, the study presents the results of the evaluation of its quality from the teachers’ perspective through an instrument designed on the basis of nine competence assessment quality criteria. The CAM was tested in a large-scale pilot study conducted in 535 primary and secondary schools across Europe. The outcomes show that the CAM mainly fulfills two out of the nine quality criteria: meaningfulness and authenticity. However, the exploratory factor analysis also reveals that all these quality criteria can be summarized into four key quality factors that more accurately describe how CAM is experienced in school teaching. Out of these, the most relevant is the (1) efficiency over time, student monitoring, support and evaluation. The three secondary factors identified are (2) fairness and cognitive complexity, (3) meaningfulness and authenticity and (4) reproducibility and transparency. The study provides a conceptual and methodological approach for the evaluation of Digital Competence in the school context. Most of all, it helps highlight four factors that, according to teaching staff, describe the quality of the proposed model when applied to daily teaching practices.

Although the literature on feedback processes has identified two approaches to feedback—more transmissive or more dialogical—there is little empirical evidence of how students perceive feedback practices, particularly in online education. Moreover, there is a lack of research addressing previous experience with online feedback (frequency, timing, type of feedback and the opportunity to resubmit their work) and how this influences student engagement. To provide evidence regarding these issues, we administered an online questionnaire to 1,766 bachelor students. Results suggested that students tend to perceive feedback practices as resembling the transmissive model. Even so, the results confirmed that students’ prior experience with online feedback influences their degree of cognitive engagement with it. The discussion in this paper focuses on the importance of carrying out dialogical feedback practices in online education, as well as demonstrating why it is important to purposefully design feedback, at both instructional and institutional levels.

Para que el feedback online cumpla su función con relación al aprendizaje, es necesario que los estudiantes se impliquen con él. Sin embargo, son pocos los estudios que han abordado el papel de las diferencias individuales en interacción con algunas características de la intervención educativa en la implicación cognitiva de los estudiantes con el feedback online. Este estudio explora las posibles relaciones entre la orientación motivacional, las creencias sobre el control del proceso de aprendizaje, la autoeficacia y las expectativas de éxito con la implicación cognitiva con el feedback. Además, se analiza si las posibilidades de reelaboración de la actividad, a partir del feedback recibido, genera diferentes niveles de implicación cognitiva. Se diseñó un cuasi-experimento con medidas pre-post. Participaron 87 estudiantes que tuvieron la posibilidad de reelaborar el trabajo a partir del feedback recibido durante el proceso y volverlo a entregar, y 80 estudiantes del grupo control sin posibilidades de reelaboración. Los resultados apuntan que no se apreciaron diferencias significativas en cuanto a la incidencia de la orientación motivacional con relación a la implicación cognitiva con el feedback, pero todos los estudiantes mostraron un elevado nivel de orientación motivacional hacia el aprendizaje. Las creencias sobre el control del proceso de aprendizaje, la autoeficacia y las expectativas de éxito incidieron en la implicación cognitiva con el feedback recibido al final de la actividad. Proporcionar feedback durante la realización de la actividad mediatizó esta influencia.