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Institutions of learning at all levels are challenged by a fast and accelerating pace of change in the development of communications technology. Conferences around the world address the issue. Research journals in a wide range of scholarly fields are placing the challenge of understanding "Education's Digital Future" on their agenda. The World Learning Summit and LINQ Conference 2017 proceedings take this as a point of origin. Noting how the future also has a past: Emergent uses of communications technologies in learning are of course neither new nor unfamiliar. What may be less familiar is the notion of "disruption", found in many of the conferences and journal entries currently.

Is the disruption of education and learning as transformative as in the case of the film industry, the music industry, journalism, and health? If so, clearly the challenge of understanding future learning and education goes to the core of institutions and organizations as much as pedagogy and practice in the classroom.

One approach to the pursuit of a critical debate is the concept of Smart Universities – educational institutions that adopt to the realities of digital online media in an encompassing manner: How can we as smarter universities and societies build sustainable learning eco systems for coming generations, where technologies serve learning and not the other way around? Perhaps that is the key question of our time, reflecting concerns and challenges in a variety of scholarly fields and disciplines? These proceedings present the results from an engaging event that took place from 7th to 9th of June 2017 in Kristiansand, Norway.

International audience ; The enormous increase of information and publications through the new media and internet channels demands for new innovative approaches regarding sharing knowledge and research results. The European Union has identified this crucial need and supports several initiatives for a better, equal and open access to knowledge. In the specific field of Agriculture, a community-based platform for sharing and discussing outcomes, methods and projects has been devised,called VOA3R. It offers a virtual place to connect researchers, students and practitioners.This ambitious approach is being challenged by 13 partners under the VOA3R consortium. VOA3R currently federates open access literature from 13 existing open access repositories and digital libraries across Europe, making use of standard vocabularies and classification schemes.The platform is available for beta use at: http://voa3r.cc.uah.es offering accesses to 500,000 documents with a target up to 2.5 million documents next year.Documents are classified using standard terminology and individually tagged. Search features are provided: from the standard options (browse, text, author, social) to innovative ones (tag cloud, navigationaloption using the drag and drop, .timeline and map views). Searches for content in VOA3R rely on unconstrained availability, so the matter of open use is fundamental.The VOA3R architecture complies with the principles of the Open Archives Initiative interoperability standards for efficient dissemination of content, applying Linked Open Data rules and integrating the semantics of the Agricultural Information Management Standards Agrovoc thesaurus with more than 40,000 concepts in no fewer than 22 languages.VOA3R encompasses also social networking functionality adding significant value to the content and enlarging the potentialities: Social networking functionalities includes the ability to rate the content of documents, to make annotations and to enter reviews; newsfeeds, microblogging and social bookmarking are also ...

The enormous increase of information and publications through the new media and internet channels demands for new innovative approaches regarding sharing knowledge and research results. The European Union has identified this crucial need and supports several initiatives for a better, equal and open access to knowledge. In the specific field of Agriculture, a community-based platform for sharing and discussing outcomes, methods and projects has been devised,called VOA3R. It offers a virtual place to connect researchers, students and practitioners.This ambitious approach is being challenged by 13 partners under the VOA3R consortium. VOA3R currently federates open access literature from 13 existing open access repositories and digital libraries across Europe, making use of standard vocabularies and classification schemes.The platform is available for beta use at: http://voa3r.cc.uah.es offering accesses to 500,000 documents with a target up to 2.5 million documents next year.Documents are classified using standard terminology and individually tagged. Search features are provided: from the standard options (browse, text, author, social) to innovative ones (tag cloud, navigationaloption using the drag and drop, .timeline and map views). Searches for content in VOA3R rely on unconstrained availability, so the matter of open use is fundamental.The VOA3R architecture complies with the principles of the Open Archives Initiative interoperability standards for efficient dissemination of content, applying Linked Open Data rules and integrating the semantics of the Agricultural Information Management Standards Agrovoc thesaurus with more than 40,000 concepts in no fewer than 22 languages.VOA3R encompasses also social networking functionality adding significant value to the content and enlarging the potentialities: Social networking functionalities includes the ability to rate the content of documents, to make annotations and to enter reviews; newsfeeds, microblogging and social bookmarking are also supported. Users can join ...

The enormous increase of information and publications through the new media and internet channels demands for new innovative approaches regarding sharing knowledge and research results. The European Union has identified this crucial need and supports several initiatives for a better, equal and open access to knowledge. In the specific field of Agriculture, a community-based platform for sharing and discussing outcomes, methods and projects has been devised,called VOA3R. It offers a virtual place to connect researchers, students and practitioners.This ambitious approach is being challenged by 13 partners under the VOA3R consortium. VOA3R currently federates open access literature from 13 existing open access repositories and digital libraries across Europe, making use of standard vocabularies and classification schemes.The platform is available for beta use at: http://voa3r.cc.uah.es offering accesses to 500,000 documents with a target up to 2.5 million documents next year.Documents are classified using standard terminology and individually tagged. Search features are provided: from the standard options (browse, text, author, social) to innovative ones (tag cloud, navigationaloption using the drag and drop, .timeline and map views). Searches for content in VOA3R rely on unconstrained availability, so the matter of open use is fundamental.The VOA3R architecture complies with the principles of the Open Archives Initiative interoperability standards for efficient dissemination of content, applying Linked Open Data rules and integrating the semantics of the Agricultural Information Management Standards Agrovoc thesaurus with more than 40,000 concepts in no fewer than 22 languages.VOA3R encompasses also social networking functionality adding significant value to the content and enlarging the potentialities: Social networking functionalities includes the ability to rate the content of documents, to make annotations and to enter reviews; newsfeeds, microblogging and social bookmarking are also supported. Users can join groups, subscribe to newsfeeds, and 'like' any items. The system also allows users to enter personal contact and history data, which is managed alongside their research contributions, so their peers and other users can contact them online or offline for discussions and to share ideas.In the next year, the VOA3R partners want to push the platform development more in the direction of Linked Open Data including advanced interlinking features and multi-vocabulary support fornavigational search. Finally, VOA3R establishes a European Open Access Association: For a future of research with unlimited openness.

While causing unprecedented disruption worldwide, COVID-19 has also stimulated the mainstreaming of digital technologies in the delivery of formal education. For most key stakeholders – organisations, educators, and students – this has been a new and challenging experience and has been described in policy terms as 'emergency remote education'. For many students, however, it has either exacerbated or marginalised their opportunity to access formal education. In probing this impact at a deeper level, an international collaboration involving the authors during 2020-2021 focused on reviewing contemporary practices and potentials of open education as a strategic and sustainable response. This paper highlights practices, case studies, and emerging issues from 13 diverse countries, to be globally representative, which include: Australia, Brazil, France, India, Mexico, the Netherlands, Nigeria, Spain, Sweden, South Korea, Taiwan, Turkey, and the United Kingdom. This collection of countries was selected based on researcher contexts and contributions. To date, findings indicate open education has demonstrable benefits for distance learning. More broadly, open educational practices are positioned to shape a 'new normal' that embraces 'global citizenship' while also being equitable and inclusive. Our aspirations are that such practices will lead to better formal education promoting and ensuring human rights, democracy, lifelong learning, safety, social justice, diversity, cultural sensitivity and inclusivity through strategic and long-term support by all stakeholders in both modes of educational delivery and access: face-to-face and distance learning.