Pedagogy and Education Management Review

Core EU Principles for Digital Transformation in Higher Education Institutions: Governance, Trust, and Interoperability

Ellana Molchanova — Wed, 31 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0200

Digital transformation has become a structural condition of higher education because HEIs increasingly depend on platforms and data infrastructures for teaching, assessment, mobility workflows, and institutional decision-making, while simultaneously facing heightened legal, ethical, and operational exposure. The article systematizes core EU principles relevant to digital transformation in HEIs and translates them into actionable governance requirements that connect governance, trust, and interoperability. A structured documentary analysis is applied to EU strategies, binding legal acts, and implementation-oriented frameworks. Qualitative coding is used to derive principle categories and map each category to institutional controls across the lifecycle of selection, deployment, use, monitoring, and retirement. The analysis shows that EU principles become operational in HEIs only when expressed as auditable controls with ownership and indicators. Core requirements include evidence-based adoption for educational value, accessibility as a release gate, GDPR-aligned minimization and DPIA routines, NIS2-aligned cybersecurity risk management, standards-based interoperability, mobility and credential portability governance, and risk-based AI governance under the AI Act. Digital transformation should be governed as socio-technical change where compliance and quality are properties of systems in use, not merely systems purchased. Future work should validate governance indicators across diverse HEI types, test maturity models against outcomes, and examine how interoperability, privacy, and AI oversight can be co-optimized without increasing administrative burden.

Ethical AI in Education: Principles, Governance, and Responsible Implementation

Igor Britchenko — Wed, 31 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0200

Artificial intelligence is increasingly embedded in education through learning analytics, adaptive learning systems, automated feedback, proctoring, student support chatbots, and generative AI tools, with implications for how decisions are justified and how responsibility is distributed. The paper aims to articulate domain-specific ethical AI principles for education that protect learner rights, reinforce equity, and preserve the integrity of assessment while enabling responsible innovation. A structured narrative review and normative synthesis are used to integrate AI ethics and governance guidance with AI-in-education research, then translate these insights into implementable principles and lifecycle governance mechanisms. The analysis shows that generic AI ethics statements are insufficient without pedagogical grounding, because educational quality depends on developmental, relational, and legitimacy conditions that are not captured by technical metrics alone. The resulting framework prioritizes human-centered educational benefit, learner agency with meaningful oversight, fairness and inclusion, privacy and data minimization, transparency proportional to decision impact, safety and well-being protections, academic integrity by design, and accountability with remedy in high-impact uses. Ethical AI in education requires institutional governance that connects values to procurement, deployment, classroom practice, monitoring, and evaluation across the AI lifecycle. Future work should strengthen measurement frameworks and empirical evidence for safeguarded AI use in high-stakes contexts, and examine implementation capacity in procurement, training, and post-deployment monitoring.

Competences for Educators, Administrators, and Students in a Digital Society: A Role-Based Framework for Capability Development

Inga Lysiak — Wed, 31 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0200

Digital transformation has redefined what it means to teach, govern, and learn, because educational practice now depends on data intensive platforms, hybrid learning models, and digitally mediated communication. This article develops a role based competence model that differentiates competences for educators, administrators, and students while retaining a shared core of digital competence domains applicable across educational systems. A structured narrative review with thematic synthesis was conducted across education, learning sciences, and educational technology governance scholarship, complemented by analysis of widely used competence frameworks. The synthesis shows that educator competences are most robust when defined as pedagogical design and assessment capability rather than tool operation, consistent with TPACK and educator specific competence frameworks. Administrative competences emerge as governance capacity that includes strategy, procurement, privacy and security, data governance, and accountability for equity impacts. Student competences extend beyond functional digital skills to critical digital literacy, self regulated learning, digital citizenship, and emerging AI literacy, aligned with citizen competence frameworks and contemporary literacy research. Competence development is most effective when treated as institutional capability building with role specific pathways, practice based assessment, and governance routines that protect inclusion and safety. Future studies should validate role specific indicators, test causal links between competence growth and learning outcomes, and develop assessment designs that capture judgement, ethics, and equity effects in AI enabled learning environments.

Students at Risk in Education: Participation, Access, and Support Pathways

Irena Malinowska — Wed, 31 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0200

Unequal participation and constrained access remain persistent barriers to educational attainment, social mobility, and inclusive development, and they shape the probability that learners disengage, experience low attainment, or drop out. The article aims to clarify how participation and access operate as distinct but interdependent dimensions of educational risk and to propose a practical framework for identifying and supporting students at risk. A structured synthesis of research and policy evidence is used to integrate global monitoring and equity frameworks with studies of participation indicators, digital exclusion, and inclusion, then translate these insights into an applied risk model. The analysis shows that access should be defined beyond enrolment to include continuity, safe learning conditions, reasonable accommodation, and meaningful opportunities to learn, while participation is conceptualized as engagement over time reflected in attendance, belonging, learning participation, and progression. The proposed model links early warning indicators to multi-tiered interventions, emphasizing disability inclusion, poverty, displacement, and digital exclusion as cumulative drivers of risk. Effective risk reduction requires integrated governance that combines ethically managed, data-informed identification with resourced school-level supports and system-level policies addressing inclusion and infrastructure. Future studies should strengthen causal evidence on intervention bundles, validate early warning systems across contexts, and develop measures that capture participation quality rather than enrolment alone.

Inclusive Gamification in Education: Engagement, Accessibility, and Equity by Design

Daria Bieńkowska — Wed, 31 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0200

Gamification, understood as the use of game design elements in non-game contexts, is increasingly used in education to strengthen engagement and to support accessibility in diverse learning environments. The article aims to synthesize evidence on gamification in education and to propose an inclusive gamification framework that improves meaningful engagement while reducing accessibility barriers for learners with diverse needs and participation constraints. A structured narrative literature review with thematic synthesis is applied. The review integrates conceptual definitions of gamification, empirical syntheses on effectiveness, and accessibility-oriented frameworks, then codes findings into themes related to engagement mechanisms, accessibility safeguards, risks and negative effects, and evaluation practices. The analysis indicates that gamification may produce positive average effects on motivation and engagement, but results are heterogeneous and depend on design quality, context, and learner characteristics. Inclusive gamification is most credible when it supports autonomy, competence, and belonging through flexible pathways, adjustable pacing, multimodal feedback, and accessible interfaces, while limiting exclusion risks created by time pressure and social comparison. Gamification should be treated as instructional architecture rather than a reward layer, with accessibility designed from the outset and monitored through both learning outcomes and equity-sensitive participation indicators. Future studies should test inclusive gamification designs in diverse contexts, strengthen causal evidence on accessibility impacts, and develop validated metrics for participation quality, belonging, and differential effects across learner groups.

Competency Gaps in Cybersecurity Teaching: Digital Skills, Pedagogy, and Governance

Boris Zarkov — Wed, 31 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0200

Cybersecurity education increasingly occurs in digitally mediated environments that require educators to integrate technical expertise with effective pedagogy and accountable governance. Yet many programs still treat educator readiness as synonymous with subject matter knowledge, leaving critical capability gaps that affect learning quality, equity, and institutional risk. This article identifies and systematizes competency gaps in cybersecurity teaching across three interdependent domains: digital skills, pedagogy, and governance. A structured narrative review and framework mapping approach was applied. Key workforce and curriculum references were used as anchors, including the NIST NICE Framework, ENISA’s European Cybersecurity Skills Framework, and the Cybersecurity Curricula 2017 guidelines, complemented by educator digital competence frameworks and cybersecurity risk governance guidance. The analysis indicates three recurring gap patterns. First, technical teaching often underemphasizes platform, cloud, and AI enabled security contexts and the transferable skills emphasized by workforce evidence. Second, pedagogical gaps appear in assessment design for authentic performance, inclusive learning design, and safe handling of sensitive or exploit oriented content. Third, governance gaps emerge in procurement literacy, data governance, incident readiness for learning platforms, and alignment of teaching practice with institutional cybersecurity risk management. Competence in cybersecurity teaching is best treated as a role-based capability that integrates digital practice, pedagogy, and governance rather than as isolated technical mastery. Future studies should validate measurable educator competency indicators, test the effects of targeted professional development on learner outcomes, and develop audit-ready governance routines for AI enabled cybersecurity instruction.