How can information and communication technology in the age of Industry 4.0 create and enhance synergies among online learning programmes; the increased diversity of stakeholders; the workplace experience; socio-cultural influences; and students' work-life balance?

To transform the education landscape, challenges come increasingly from the socio-cultural-economic, structural, and policy fields. Education has to be visionary to reach efficiency gains and new sources, and to offer sustainable services that reflect the complexity of modern societies.

Market realities and social responsibility put similar pressures on the corporate and university worlds. Stakeholders expect academia to respond to needs beyond teaching and research; better promote innovation and the knowledge economy; and manage the new student populations. Universities are expected to detect and attract talents and be magnets of inputs from practitioners that result in a cooperative surplus.

Vocationalisation of education also means the emergence of new skill sets. The progress in industrial automation and ICTs opens possibilities for lifelong learning resource development and work-based learning, as well as the integration of human-machine intelligence models.

Educational technologies are about connections among information, knowledge, action, emotion, and value: knowledge construction; learning activities by sharing and thinking; interactivity; aggregative mechanisms; cooperation; and integration in order to meet the requirements of the knowledge age and to satisfy the needs of social transformation and learning innovation.

The new generation of learning technologies and networks are ubiquitous, embedded, and mobile, and they reshape access to and delivery of learning. Cutting-edge fields include artificial intelligence; learning analytics; microlearning; new credentialing; revolution in assessment; massive open online courses (MOOCs); personalized learning; game based learning; flipped classroom; and digital makerspaces.

The question remains as to which of these will have significant and sustained impact in the future. Can the networked society become an enhanced learning society?

The call for contributions is open until 04 February 2019.