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Over the past few decades, the higher education landscape underwent dramatic changes, causing strain on higher education institutions (HEI) worldwide. The academic debate is filled with very well-argued accounts of these developments. Advances in information and communication technology (ICT) add an additional layer to this already complex reality. Against this backdrop, it is necessary that the question of managing and administering HEI today be rethought. Emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI) and cognitive computing, augmented, virtual and mixed reality (R+), Internet of Things (IoT), blockchain, bear the promise to effectively assisting HEI administrators in navigating their institutions through the period of profound change. This chapter offers a brief account of that.

Technology-enhanced learning (TEL), particularly in science, technology, engineering, arts, and math (STEAM), revolutionizes educational approaches by fostering active, transformative learning and expediting the learning process. TEL employs various tools like online courses, artificial intelligence (AI) technologies, virtual reality (VR), simulations, makerspaces, visual learning, and project-based learning, all contributing to accelerated learning in STEAM. A notable TEL innovation is the emergence of Large Language Models (LLMs) and AI chatbots, exemplified by the release of GPT-3 in December 2022. These tools utilize extensive parameters to generate natural language and perform tasks such as classification and prediction, thereby offering personalized and collaborative learning experiences essential for STEAM education. The generative pre-training transformer (GPT), a leading model in natural language processing (NLP), excels in generating human-like text and handling complex tasks like translation, summarization, and question answering. This chapter explores TEL environments that support transformative learning in STEAM, focusing on AI models. It reviews research on TEL’s impact on STEAM education, discussing the constructionism theory and emphasizing TEL’s role in creating engaging, student-centered learning experiences. However, challenges like technology access, instructor training, infrastructure, internet connectivity, and hardware resources are crucial. Additionally, the rise of AI brings ethical concerns regarding privacy, security, and potential biases in AI algorithms. Despite these hurdles, TEL’s potential to enhance STEAM learning experiences and accelerate the educational process is significant. By effectively implementing TEL strategies and leveraging LLMs and AI tools, educators can substantially improve learning outcomes in STEAM education.

In this chapter, we describe the challenge and experience to spread out information and communication technologies (ICT) and how to implement them progressively, in order to improve administrative, academic, and pedagogical issues. As a case study, institutional strategies to tackle these issues in the higher education institutions (HEI) that belong to the Instituto Politécnico Nacional of Mexico (IPN) are described. The main challenge of HEI to incorporate cutting-edge technology in order to form professionals according to educational models and needs of the worldwide is pointed out. Thus, the intended focus of this work is to elevate the discourse and generate awareness about information and communication technologies to translate the language for being legible and understandable to deans, directors, and general authorities of HEI so that they can clearly make decisions with respect to the benefits that current technologies bring to the education institutions, and thus they can keep in mind investing important economic resources in future and mature technologies. Nowadays, HEI of the IPN are facing problems regarding the allocation of budgetary resources, so the strategies and analytical discussion of how ICT can envision the growth of HEI is a very timely issue to be presented to the Mexican government.

The purpose of this paper is to define a community memory for a virtual communities of practice (CoP) based on organizational learning (OL) concept and ontologies.

The paper focuses on applying the OL concept to virtual CoP and proposes a framework for building the CoP memory by identifying several layers of ontologies such as generic, knowledge, domain, and task ontologies. A CoP of e‐learning is used as an example of semantic learning organization and as an application for the proposed framework.

Applying the proposed framework on the CoP of e‐learning and more specifically in the instructional engineering domain shows that community knowledge can be reified and shared among the members. This framework can be used as a backbone for other CoP in other fields.

This present work proposed a general framework for the CoP memory using a knowledge engineering approach and proposing different forms of ontologies as a backbone for the memory. It also suggests that the knowledge capitalization is important as well as the contextual element.