The rapid development and the integration of emerging technologies are changing the perceptions in all aspects of education. As the current tourism education is considered traditional, changes in learning environments, educational methods, and curricula are required. Additionally, the latest COVID- 19 pandemic developments have led to a new perspective of education through digital technologies, changing how universities perceive the teaching and the learning process. As a result of these circumstances, the transformation of higher tourism education is more than ever a current issue preparing students to face the new challenges that arise. This paper proposes an educational framework using the Transformative Learning Theory and digital technologies, providing a contemporary learning design, and offering flexible use of many digital technologies and tools, leading to the development of tourism students according to the needs of modern society. It can also lead to the transformation of dysfunctional beliefs and assumptions of tourism students to be more functional and thrive. Implementing the educational framework can lead to the upgrade of the provided tourism education and its transformation, leading to a higher quality of the tourism services. 

This study aimed to implement an intervention program to examine whether tablets enhance kindergarten children’s phonemic awareness. Seventy-four (74) kindergarten children (40 boys and 34 girls) aged 4 to 6 years from 4 public kindergarten classrooms participated in the study, from which 38 children formed the experimental group while 36 children formed the control one. During the intervention program, children in the experimental group were trained through tablets in initial phoneme identification, initial phoneme deletion, and phoneme segmentation, while the control group trained in the same tasks without tablets. Results showed statistically significant differences in favor of the experimental group. In conclusion, the present research found that digital media help educational practice, but it is also how teachers use digital tools to facilitate learning.

During the first period of the covid-19 pandemic, schools in Greece suspended the face-to-face operation for about three months, and teachers were called in an emergency to adjust the teaching methods remotely. The educational community was called to deal with this emergency with the primary goal to maintain students’ contact with the educational process. The urgent use of distance communication and teaching forms was a project with many difficulties for teachers, students, and parents. In all this transition process, the practice and learning communities that teachers themselves organized were crucial. The Greek eTwinning community immediately implemented three MOOC seminars (Mass Open Online Courses), which were designed to assist them in the use and pedagogical utilization of distance education tools. More than 30,000 teachers participated in these seminars. In this paper, we present the results of a survey conducted on a sample of 1080 Greek teachers, members of the eTwinning community, and we describe how they dealt with remotely teaching. The research refers to tools used, the distance communication content, and the difficulties encountered to implement the whole project.

Nowadays, smart mobile devices such as tablets and accompanying applications (apps) are a part of young children's daily lives. In kindergarten education, properly designed digital educational activities can become a potent educational tool for efficient and effective learning. These tools allow children to take advantage of new learning platforms and effectively reach new knowledge through activities related to their immediate interests and real-life scenarios in learning domains, such as mathematics. At the Department of Preschool Education, University of Crete, systematic research was carried out in the last years to investigate whether there are compelling benefits to using tablet-type devices in preschool education to implement teaching reform proposals to implement the Realistic Mathematical Education in kindergarten classrooms. The findings propose mobile devices' integration, running developmentally appropriate apps, in kindergarten classrooms. These apps were based on the three levels of Realistic Mathematics Education (RME), targeting fundamental mathematical concepts for the kindergarten level.

The journal Advances in Educational Research and Evaluation is a peer-reviewed openaccess journal aimed to be a medium for discussing a wide range of international educational experiences and assessment techniques. The journal intends to publish high-quality articles, the scope of which includes but is not limited to topics mentioned in this editorial. With the support of an international team of educational scholars who kindly volunteered to serve on the editorial board, the journal is set to adhere to the highest publishing ethics standards.