In digital education, it is common to discuss tools, formats, or models, but far less common to pause and examine what evidence actually shows that students have learned. This is the starting point of “Evidence of Learning in Educational Practices Mediated by Digital Technologies,” by César Coll Salvador, Frida Díaz Barriga Arceo, Anna Engel Rocamora, and Jesús Salinas Ibáñez.
The text serves as the introductory article to the RIED-Revista Iberoamericana de Educación a Distancia special issue of the same title, and this is no minor detail: the authors are also the coordinators of the monograph. They write to define the problem, justify the focus, and provide a framework for reading the collection as a whole.
The article places learning within a “new ecology” shaped by virtual, blended, and hybrid contexts, as well as by a wide range of technologies and techno-pedagogical designs. From there, it reviews several frameworks for thinking about technology integration (Mindtools, SAMR, Coll’s interactive triangle approach, and the PICRAT model), highlighting a consistent idea: technologies do not add value on their own; their value depends on how they are used within specific educational practices.
Consequently, the challenge is not merely to classify tools or levels of integration, but to analyze how practices are transformed (or not) and what types of learning outcomes can be soundly attributed to these mediations.
The third section presents the studies included in the special issue, emphasizing the diversity of settings, methodologies, and types of evidence: student productions, platform activity traces, interaction analyses, assessment instruments, and performance measures, among others. The text stresses that, despite the abundance of research on online learning, learning outcomes and the quality of the evidence supporting them have often taken a secondary role or been replaced by indicators such as satisfaction, participation, or “engagement.”
As an introduction, its main contribution is to make the special issue’s standard of rigor explicit: describing practices mediated by digital technologies is important, but above all, it is essential to show what evidence supports the claim that these practices generate meaningful learning, and how those criteria vary across contexts and moments.
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How to Cite: Coll Salvador, C., Díaz Barriga Arceo, F., Engel Rocamora, A., & Salinas Ibáñez, J. (2023). Evidence of Learning in Educational Practices Mediated by Digital Technologies. RIED-Revista Iberoamericana de Educación a Distancia, 26(2), 9–25. https://doi.org/10.5944/ried.26.2.37293
