Higher education faces many challenges, the salient ones being: increasing student engagement, knowledge accessibility and retention, constructive feedback, and preparation for the job market. Professionals in higher education around the world have been very active in adopting information and communications technology (ICT) tools to tackle those challenges. The following is a concise summary of those efforts.

The last decades have known a tremendous shift from traditional teaching to the use of ICT to support teaching in higher education. It began with the publication of lecture notes and lab sheets on the course website. It then evolved to the use of more interactive tools such as Moodle, Blackboard Learn, and so on. The latter expands users’ learning experience through the use of discussion forums, online coursework submissions, and grading. The use of social networks has also driven a better organization of student communities. This trend is still going strong, especially with the creation of dedicated plugins to support students’ exchange of learning data such as source code using Slack. Last but not least, the last few years have seen the emergence of mobile learning apps as a way to increase the accessibility of teaching material anytime, anywhere.

In summary, higher education has taken every opportunity to tackle its challenges through the use of the latest technologies (social networks, video lectures, online forums, and so on) that are now firmly established and very familiar to any student in higher education. The current title suggests the exploration of the latest approaches in the field. My main criticism of the book is that it rather discusses well-established technologies in higher education. The use of social networks (chapter 5), video lectures (chapter 6), and massive open online courses (MOOCs) chapters 10, 11, 12, 17, 19), just to name few, are all technologies that have been adopted in higher education for a long time now and therefore can no longer be considered innovative.

This doesn’t reduce the quality of the papers composing the publication, though. The key point here is that the reader is expecting cutting-edge tools and approaches to teaching in higher education rather than existing ones. The first chapter, “Green Computing Through Virtual Learning Environments,” while quite in context, doesn’t tackle the major problem: how to accurately determine the actual savings over time (in cost and environmental impact) of green computing initiatives for educational institutions, countries, and the world. The latter is the only way to persuade higher education decision makers of their adoption. Nonetheless, the challenge is mentioned as a future research direction in the chapter.

Finally, it would have been very enriching to emphasize the impact of the use of new technologies on the quality of teaching. Being mentioned only sparsely in a few chapters of the book, it is in my opinion the main objective of any innovation in higher education. Adopting cutting-edge technologies is not by definition always positive, despite the great enthusiasm. Researchers should be aware of the side effects and their implications long term. To name only a couple, taking into account cultural differences in using MOOCs globally and the decrease of teacher/student face-to-face contact have certainly had a huge impact on information comprehension. In-depth studies should be carried out in order to safely adopt any new technology on a larger scale.