Introducción. Esta investigación realizó un estudio comparativo entre tres países muy impactados por el coronavirus a partir del análisis de las reflexiones de docentes y estudiantes sobre la enseñanza virtual universitaria durante la etapa de confinamiento. Metodología. El estudio, de carácter descriptivo, exploratorio y explicativo, aplicó encuestas, entre marzo y abril de 2020, a estudiantes y docentes de Periodismo, Comunicación y Educación de la Universidad Autónoma de Barcelona (España), Universidad de Torino (Italia) y Universidad Técnica de Machala (Ecuador). La encuesta tuvo respuestas de 300 estudiantes (100 por país) y 196 docentes. Resultados. Los estudiantes, de forma mayoritaria, valoran negativamente el paso a la virtualidad, pues este se asocia, de forma recurrente, con un incremente de la carga lectiva. La teleformación ha contribuido a impactar negativamente en la visión del alumnado sobre sus formadores, mientras que en estos últimos demandan competencias digitales básicas en los jóvenes universitarios. Discusión. Según los hallazgos obtenidos, los docentes, en el escenario de la teleformación, deben mostrar conocimientos no solo sobre el contenido de la materia, sino también conocimiento tecnológico y pedagógico-digital. Conclusiones. El docente tiene que ser capaz de innovar, reflexionar y transformar sus propuestas didácticas para responder a las demandas sociales que vive el mundo en medio de una crisis sanitaria, a la vez que se alcancen los objetivos curriculares propuestos al inicio del curso. Por otro lado, los docentes encuestados reconocen que es necesario la promoción del pensamiento crítico y reflexivo vinculado a la gestión estratégica de las TIC.

Digital literacy constitutes the basis for citizenship in order to be effective and efficient in the 21st Century in professional and personal lives. The set of skills and competences integrating digital literacy are expected to be guaranteed in higher education. During the lockdown globally imposed for the COVID-19 pandemic, educational systems worldwide had to face many disruptive changes. The aim of this research is to present a comparative study of three countries’ higher education institutions (Spain, Italy, and Ecuador), analyzing how they have faced the global lockdown situation, focusing on the development of digital literacy. The methodological approach followed in this study was quantitative with an exploratory-correlational scope using a questionnaire designed ad hoc and applied in a sample of 376 students. Results point the necessity of enhancing the main aspects such as the teacher’s digital skills, sources for learning that may be adapted, communication between universities and students, and teaching methodologies that should be appropriate to the current context. Conclusions may suggest rethinking higher education learning and reinforcing main issues for this transformation, mainly: communication, teaching, and digital competences. Otherwise, digital literacy is not being guaranteed, which means higher education is not accomplishing one of its main objectives.

Spain and Italy are amongst the European countries where the COVID-19 pandemic has produced its major impact and where lockdown measures have been the harshest. This research aims at understanding how the corona crisis has been represented in Spanish and Italian media, focusing on reference newspapers. The study analyzes 72 front pages of El País and El Mundo in Spain and Italy’s Corriere della Sera and La Repubblica, collecting 710 news items and 3456 data evidences employing a mixed method (both qualitative and quantitative) based on content analysis and hemerographic analysis. Results show a predominance of informative journalistic genres (especially brief and news), while the visual framing emerging from the photographic choice, tend to foster humanization through an emotional representation of the pandemic. Politicians are the most represented actors, showing a high degree of politicization of the crisis.

The COVID-19 pandemic has transformed training processes. The transition from face-to-face to virtuality has affected the entire educational process favoring one of the open innovation key features in the higher education institutions: the ability to manage knowledge flow. Open innovation in this crisis situation will encourage universities to deal with difficulties and embrace opportunities to enhance knowledge production. In this regard, the main objective of this work is to analyze how universities have managed knowledge flow during lockdown situation. The research presents a comparative study between three countries highly impacted by the coronavirus (Spain, Italy and Ecuador) based on perceptions from teachers and students on a convenience sample of 573 individuals. The study, of a descriptive and exploratory nature, applied surveys between March and April 2020 to students and teachers of Journalism, Communication. The survey had 2956 responses, collecting 65,032 pieces of evidence from students and 6468 from teachers. Teachers and students show their preference for being present, but they recognize the justification for the change of scenery and identify positive elements in virtuality. According to the findings obtained, the absence of presence has not generated an increase in the meetings between teachers and students. In addition, the tutorials have been shorter and sporadic. Added to this is a scant commitment to the variety of resources and options offered by the Internet. The predominance of textual material collides with the demand from students for a mixture of training resources, a greater role for the podcast and, especially, a typology of assessment tests that pass the traditional exams.

TikTok, already widely used before the pandemic, boomed during the quarantine that locked down large parts of the world, reaching 2 billion downloads and 800 million monthly active users worldwide by the end of 2020. Of these 800 million users, 41% are aged between 16 and 24 years. This social network, widely known for its entertainment videos, is increasingly becoming a place for political discussion and therefore a unique opportunity for political actors to (re)connect with young people. Acknowledging that the political uses of TikTok are still understudied, this paper aims to explore whether and how Spanish political parties are including TikTok as part of their communication strategy. Through an affordance-centered content analysis of all the posts published by the five most important Spanish political parties (PP, PSOE, Ciudadanos, Podemos, and Vox), the current results show that, although all Spanish political parties have adopted this platform, their usage is unequal. From a quantitative perspective, PP was the first party to open a TikTok account, but its usage has been discontinuous; Podemos and Ciudadanos are the parties that publish the most and most constantly, while Vox has only published nine posts and the PSOE one. Nonetheless, from a qualitative perspective, Podemos and Vox generate more engagement and seem to understand and exploit TikTok’s specific affordances better. The findings allow it to be concluded that, although globally Spanish political parties do not fully exploit the platform’s affordances and tend to use it as a unilateral tool for promotion, the most engaging posts are those favoring interaction and geared toward politainment.

Smartphones have become a key social tool: They have changed the way people consume, receive and produce information, providing potentially anyone with the opportunity to create and share content through a variety of platforms. The use of smartphones for gathering, producing, editing and disseminating news gave birth to a new journalistic practice, mobile journalism. Incorporating mobile journalism is, thus, the current challenge for journalism educators. Our article aims at discovering whether new models of education, such as massive online courses, can help mobile journalism training. The research focuses on the first pilot project of a massive open online courses (MOOC) on mobile journalism, the Y-NEX MOOC. By assessing structure, functioning and participants’ opinion, the objective is to discover if MOOCs prove to be useful tools in mobile journalism training. Results show that this model of distance open learning can be helpful for mobile journalism training, providing some recommendations for improvement.

Exclusionary populism is well known for twisting real grievances of the citizens, by problematizing the gap between “us” and “them”, capitalizing on identity lines, calling out as “others” those who do not share “pure people’s” identity and culture. Especially after 9/11, Muslims have become the ideal-type of “other”, making Islamophobia the primary populist anti-paradigm. This article contributes to the burgeoning literature on Islamophobic populism analyzing the presence of Islamophobia in the electoral discourse of Vox party in Spain and Lega in Italy. In addition, it makes a novel contribution by discussing and testing the existence of different models of Islamophobia, distinguishing between “banal Islamophobia” and “ontological Islamophobia”. Applying clause-based semantic text analysis—including qualitative and quantitative variables—to thirty speeches by the two party leaders, Santiago Abascal and Matteo Salvini, during the last three elections (General, Regional and European), the paper concludes that, despite the similarities, the two politician display two different models of Islamophobia. Whereas Abascal displays a clear “ontological Islamophobia”, depicting Muslims ontologically incompatible with Spanish civilization (defined precisely by its anti-Muslim history), the latter presents a mix of arguments that oscillate between “ontological” and “banal” Islamophobia.

El artículo presenta los resultados de un estudio descriptivo que analiza 12 planes de estudios sobre Comunicación y Periodismo de las 8 universidades más prestigiosas del mundo en el ámbito de la Comunicación, según el Índice QS World University. Metodología: Bajo una perspectiva metodológica cuantitativa y cualitativa, el trabajo analiza los objetivos, las competencias, las áreas temáticas, el tipo de asignaturas y la distribución en el currículo académico a partir del estudio de los planes de estudio y de un total de 542 asignaturas. Se identifican buenas prácticas y se señalan tendencias en el diseño curricular de los planes de estudio. Resultados y conclusiones: El estudio permite señalar que las universidades apuestan por planes de estudios con un predominio de asignaturas optativas que garanticen una formación humanista de base para el alumno. El estudiante se convierte en el responsable de definir gran parte de su itinerario formativo.