Currently, the scenario of university media education seems to be constituted from an increasing awareness of the need to favor the development of participatory cultures where students not only interact with each other constituting learning communities in the classroom, but at the same time use a whole series of resources extracted from the media flow through which they confer meaning to their daily lives (Jenkins, Ito, Boyd, 2015), conforming then what has been called a culture of connectivity.

One of the phenomena emerging most strongly within this trend towards the shaping of participatory cultures and collective construction is that of transmedia storytelling (Scolari, 2016).

Transmedia storytelling refers to stories told across multiple media. The most important stories tend to flow across multiple platforms and media (Wängqvist, M. & Frisén, A. 2016). From the consumers' perspective, transmedia practices promote multi-literacy, that is, the ability to comprehensively interpret discourses coming from different media and languages. It is a matter of understanding how young people are acquiring transmedia skills and incorporating these processes into the educational sphere so that learning is a collateral effect of creative production and community collaboration, which is called connected learning (Ito, 2010).

The use of digital technologies has provided an opportunity for the exercise of new forms of social interaction that are currently transforming the functioning and role of formal learning institutions, especially schools and universities (Malone, T. W., Bernstein, M. S., 2015). One of the most important challenges we must face is that all these experiences in which new forms of production, communication and acquisition of knowledge, generated in areas of diverse nature and origin are developed, extended and disseminated, have a translation at the educational level, and are transformed into comprehensive learning processes (Ito, 2010). Digital media, then, opens the door to a new educational paradigm in which learning can take place "anytime, anywhere", a cultural dynamic that has been described in the literature as ubiquitous and that reminds us that everyday life becomes a space for new pedagogies and new learning practices.

This study focuses  on the possibilities offered by transmedia narratives to initiate open, creative and participatory processes of content production and dissemination in university classrooms from a perspective oriented to social empowerment and community development.

The objective of the research is to deepen the analysis of the design and creation of transmedia narratives elaborated by young university students within the framework of participatory network cultures that combine the creation of multimedia content with educational proposals oriented to social and community development.

The research question of the study  are: Do the modalities and strategies of participation, collaboration and propagability present in transmedia literacy processes allow young university students to empower themselves concerning the different spheres present in digital culture and communication?

The research process was carried out during the 2022/23 academic year within the framework of the Social Communication Media course belonging to the Social Education Degree at the University of Valladolid (Castilla y León-Spain). The study develops a narrative research focused on transmedia narrative productions with young university students through which they shape ways of acting and configure meanings in the hyperconnected environment. The research instruments and data sources used to carry out the research were as follows - Transmedia storytelling: refers to the transmedia productions chosen by different groups for analysis, both in the field of fiction (e.g. literature, cinema, music, video games, etc.) and in the field of social reality (e.g. journalism and social documentation). - Classroom observations: in the two classrooms where the research was carried out, there was an external observer who made observations on the dynamics of classroom work. - Comments and recommendations made in the group work: all the work done in group by the young people, collected in the form of comments and written texts to each of the narratives. - Video recordings: all the processes of designing, creating, presenting and sharing in the classroom of students' work were recorded on video.

The design and creation of transmedia educational projects allow the configuration of a new educational ecology (Cobo and Moravec, 2011) in the university classroom. Agents with diverse roles throughout the process in the classroom initiate open and participatory processes of production and distribution of knowledge through the use and appropriation of technologies and digital artifacts involved in the creation of transmedia content (Bar, Weber and Pisani, 2016). The educational design around narratives tries to explore how young university students involved in collaborative and participatory activities of design, creation, presentation and dissemination through the network of their own techno-media experiences, not only find a personal meaning to their participation in digital culture but also qualitatively and quantitatively modify their own informational capital by appropriating all these tools, knowledge and practical skills in the digital ecosystem of the augmented society. Educational designs from a transmedia perspective such as the one we have studied allow us to help redefine the active role that social media and media culture can play as instruments of social and citizen empowerment (Buckingham and Kehily, 2014). At the same time, we believe that the processes associated with transmedia literacy can be a good opportunity to reintroduce issues related to citizenship into university classrooms.

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