During the COVID‐19 crisis, digital informal learning is important for students' academic engagement. Although scholars have highlighted the importance of students' digital competence in improving digital informal learning (DIL), the mediating role of DIL between digital competence and academic engagement has remained ambiguous. The purpose of this study is to investigate the relationship between students' digital competence and their academic engagement with the mediating role of DIL in the higher education context. This study used a descriptive correlational design, and the data were analyzed using structural equation modelling (SEM). The study sample included 308 students from Shiraz University, Iran. The results showed that digital competence positively and significantly correlated with students' DIL and their academic engagement. Furthermore, DIL, as the mediator variable, was found to mediate the relationship between students' digital competence and their academic engagement. Since higher education institutions have a key role in improving students' academic engagement, particularly in the COVID‐19 pandemic, academic administrators should pay more attention to students' digital competencies and provide them with efficient and user‐friendly DIL platforms that can increase their academic engagement.

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An abstract is a brief and comprehensive summary of the contents of the article. It allows readers to survey the various definitions that have been presented by scholars about the concept of curriculum as a "plan" or "product", and due to the vast variation of definitions, many classifications have been made in regarding them. Since "the curriculum" is not a "type" but has "types" itself, it is not possible to present a comprehensive definition for all those curricula such as intended, implemented, learned, implicit, hidden, sterilized, omitted, neglected, empty, taught, not taught, existed, non-existed, and so on. Therefore each curriculum must be defined based on its own unique type. In this article by using a new and innovative approach, more than 200 types of curricula, based on their common traits, are classified into 16 categories. The analysis and classification which are unique and unexampled in its own nature in the curriculum literature explain some controversies about the definitions and types of curricula categorization.