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The pandemic caused by COVID-19 is not just a global crisis, it is ‘the first’ global crisis, and as the mandatory confinement shifted all education to Emergency Remote Instruction/Teaching/Learning, Higher Education Institutions were faced with the heavy task of balancing the immediate massive technological-pedagogical request by teachers and providing students with the socio-educational support that they need. This paper analyses the socio-educational impacts of the current confinement period on student’s lives and how they are responding to implemented ERL solutions, specifically in a stage of abundant pressing changes in which critical challenges are mostly felt. A close-ended questionnaire was built, comprising six dimensions of issues that may impact ERL: educational and organizational issues, technological and working conditions, social issues, family-related issues, psychological issues, and financial issues. Results were collected right after the first month of ERL and reveal that the most severe problems reside on the pedagogical and psychological domains.

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Social media has become one of the most prolific fields for interchange of multidisciplinary expertise. In this paper, computer science, communication and management are brought together for the development of a sound strategic content analysis, in the Higher Education Sector. The authors present a study comprised of two stages: analysis of SM content and corresponding audience engagement according to a weighted scale, and a classification of content strategies, which builds on different noticeable articulations of editorial areas among organizations. Their approach is based on an automatic classification of content according to a pre-defined editorial model. The proposed methodology and research results offer academic and practical findings for organizations striving on social media.

The exponential growth of social media usage and the integration of digital natives in Higher Education Institutions (HEI) have been posing new challenges to both traditional and technology-mediated learning environments. Nowadays social media plays an important, if not central, role in society, for professional and personal purposes. However, it's important to highlight that in the mind of a digital native, social media is not just a tool, it is a place that is as real and as natural as any real-life world place where formal/informal social interactions happen. Still, formal higher education contexts are still mostly imprisoned in locked up institutional Learning Management Systems (LMS), while a new world of social connections grows and develops itself outside schools. One of the main reasons we believe to be persisting in the origin of the matter is the absence of a suitable management, monitoring and analysis tools to legitimize and to efficiently manage the relationship with students in social networks. In this paper we discuss the growing relevance of the "Social Student Relationship Management" concept and introduce the EduBridge Social system, which aims at connecting the most commonly used LMS, Moodle, and the most popular social network, Facebook.

Social networks are becoming a wide repository of information, some of which may be of interest for general audiences. In this study we investigate which features may be extracted from single posts propagated throughout a social network, and that are indicative of its relevance, from a journalistic perspective. We then test these features with a set of supervised learning algorithms in order to evaluate our hypothesis. The main results indicate that if a text fragment is pointed out as being interesting, meaningful for the majority of people, reliable and with a wide scope, then it is more likely to be considered as relevant. This approach also presents promising results when validated with several well-known learning algorithms.

A global youth employment crisis and the transformation of the ICT labour market has been raising severe concerns and worldwide recommendations for the coordination of cross-field and cross-level agents, as well as the need for coherent strategies based on research and dialogue between workers, employers, organizations and youth groups to decrease the number of NEET. In this context, the Direction Employment project sets as a main objective to promote the integration of underprivileged minorities into the labour market, namely the NEET youth. To address the identified difficulties, an experimental educational and social intervention model was developed and will be implemented in different EU regional contexts, combining innovative pedagogical methodologies with social support structures for young people. This paper presents a methodology for the convergence of the main axis concerning NEET youth unemployment in the ICT labour market, namely educators and trainers, ICT employers and professionals, psychologists and young people, as well as the expected outcomes and key indicators for the assessment of the desired social/professional impact.