Digital literacy constitutes the basis for citizenship in order to be effective and efficient in the 21st Century in professional and personal lives. The set of skills and competences integrating digital literacy are expected to be guaranteed in higher education. During the lockdown globally imposed for the COVID-19 pandemic, educational systems worldwide had to face many disruptive changes. The aim of this research is to present a comparative study of three countries’ higher education institutions (Spain, Italy, and Ecuador), analyzing how they have faced the global lockdown situation, focusing on the development of digital literacy. The methodological approach followed in this study was quantitative with an exploratory-correlational scope using a questionnaire designed ad hoc and applied in a sample of 376 students. Results point the necessity of enhancing the main aspects such as the teacher’s digital skills, sources for learning that may be adapted, communication between universities and students, and teaching methodologies that should be appropriate to the current context. Conclusions may suggest rethinking higher education learning and reinforcing main issues for this transformation, mainly: communication, teaching, and digital competences. Otherwise, digital literacy is not being guaranteed, which means higher education is not accomplishing one of its main objectives.

Introducción. Esta investigación realizó un estudio comparativo entre tres países muy impactados por el coronavirus a partir del análisis de las reflexiones de docentes y estudiantes sobre la enseñanza virtual universitaria durante la etapa de confinamiento. Metodología. El estudio, de carácter descriptivo, exploratorio y explicativo, aplicó encuestas, entre marzo y abril de 2020, a estudiantes y docentes de Periodismo, Comunicación y Educación de la Universidad Autónoma de Barcelona (España), Universidad de Torino (Italia) y Universidad Técnica de Machala (Ecuador). La encuesta tuvo respuestas de 300 estudiantes (100 por país) y 196 docentes. Resultados. Los estudiantes, de forma mayoritaria, valoran negativamente el paso a la virtualidad, pues este se asocia, de forma recurrente, con un incremente de la carga lectiva. La teleformación ha contribuido a impactar negativamente en la visión del alumnado sobre sus formadores, mientras que en estos últimos demandan competencias digitales básicas en los jóvenes universitarios. Discusión. Según los hallazgos obtenidos, los docentes, en el escenario de la teleformación, deben mostrar conocimientos no solo sobre el contenido de la materia, sino también conocimiento tecnológico y pedagógico-digital. Conclusiones. El docente tiene que ser capaz de innovar, reflexionar y transformar sus propuestas didácticas para responder a las demandas sociales que vive el mundo en medio de una crisis sanitaria, a la vez que se alcancen los objetivos curriculares propuestos al inicio del curso. Por otro lado, los docentes encuestados reconocen que es necesario la promoción del pensamiento crítico y reflexivo vinculado a la gestión estratégica de las TIC.

The COVID-19 pandemic has transformed training processes. The transition from face-to-face to virtuality has affected the entire educational process favoring one of the open innovation key features in the higher education institutions: the ability to manage knowledge flow. Open innovation in this crisis situation will encourage universities to deal with difficulties and embrace opportunities to enhance knowledge production. In this regard, the main objective of this work is to analyze how universities have managed knowledge flow during lockdown situation. The research presents a comparative study between three countries highly impacted by the coronavirus (Spain, Italy and Ecuador) based on perceptions from teachers and students on a convenience sample of 573 individuals. The study, of a descriptive and exploratory nature, applied surveys between March and April 2020 to students and teachers of Journalism, Communication. The survey had 2956 responses, collecting 65,032 pieces of evidence from students and 6468 from teachers. Teachers and students show their preference for being present, but they recognize the justification for the change of scenery and identify positive elements in virtuality. According to the findings obtained, the absence of presence has not generated an increase in the meetings between teachers and students. In addition, the tutorials have been shorter and sporadic. Added to this is a scant commitment to the variety of resources and options offered by the Internet. The predominance of textual material collides with the demand from students for a mixture of training resources, a greater role for the podcast and, especially, a typology of assessment tests that pass the traditional exams.

Introduction: Political parties struggle to reconnect to Young people by using social networks. Acknowledging that 2020 has been the year of TikTok, most Spanish political parties have joined this social network: Podemos, with 191.400 followers and 3.1 million likes, is the most followed political party on this platform. Method: Using multimodal content analysis, this paper aims at analyzing how the party is using this social network, and for which purposes, placing the attention on how Podemos has adapted to TikTok specificities in terms of both language and technical affordances. Results: Results show that while the party perfectly adapts to TikTok’s specific language and technical affordances (special effects, etc.), instead of focusing on entertainment, the platform’s main genre, it uses TikTok as a showcase for political activities, failing in favoring a renovating relationship with users. However, politics is represented through the “game frame”, that is to say, dramatized as a battlefield between Good and Evil, which strengthens the populist dichotomous vision of the world, endorsing emotional response. Conclusion: In this sense, it is possible to conclude that, although Podemos mainly displays political content, this content falls into the category of politainment. Considering that present trends in usage rates suggest that the short-video format is the future of social media, we might expect an increase in politainmement content.

The irruption of artificial intelligence (AI) and automated technology has substantially changed the journalistic profession, transforming the way of capturing, processing, generating, and distributing information; empowering the work of journalists by modifying the routines and knowledge required by information professionals. This study, which conceptualizes the “exo journalism” on the basis of the impact of AI on the journalism industry, is part of a research project of the Observatory for Information Innovation in the Digital Society (OI2). The results, derived from documentary research supported by case studies and in-depth interviews, propose that AI is a source of innovation and personalization of journalistic content and that it can contribute to the improvement of professional practice, allowing the emergence of a kind of "exo journalist", a conceptual proposal that connects the possibilities of AI with the needs of journalism’s own productive routines. The end result is the enhancement of the journalist’s skills and the improvement of the news product. The research focuses on conceptualizing a kind of support and complement for journalists in the performance of their tasks based on the possibilities of AI in the automatic generation of content and data verification.

Spain and Italy are amongst the European countries where the COVID-19 pandemic has produced its major impact and where lockdown measures have been the harshest. This research aims at understanding how the corona crisis has been represented in Spanish and Italian media, focusing on reference newspapers. The study analyzes 72 front pages of El País and El Mundo in Spain and Italy’s Corriere della Sera and La Repubblica, collecting 710 news items and 3456 data evidences employing a mixed method (both qualitative and quantitative) based on content analysis and hemerographic analysis. Results show a predominance of informative journalistic genres (especially brief and news), while the visual framing emerging from the photographic choice, tend to foster humanization through an emotional representation of the pandemic. Politicians are the most represented actors, showing a high degree of politicization of the crisis.