EC-TEL 2018: 13th European Conference for Technology-Enhanced Learning Leeds, UK, September 3-6, 2018 |
Conference website | http://www.ec-tel.eu |
Submission link | https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=ectel2018 |
Abstract registration deadline | April 15, 2018 |
Submission deadline | April 29, 2018 |
The European Conference on Technology-Enhanced Learning (EC-TEL) engages researchers, practitioners, educational developers, entrepreneurs and policy makers to address current challenges and advances in the field. This year’s theme is ‘Lifelong technology enhanced learning: Dealing with the complexity of 21st century challenges’.
We live in an increasingly digital and globalized world that offers great opportunities for information sharing and the generation of new knowledge. This reality has enabled us to move forward rapidly as a society in many respects, but has also led us to complex, diverse and interdisciplinary challenges that affect all areas of knowledge such as health, demographic change and wellbeing; food security and bioeconomy; secure and clean energy; smart and green energy; or climate action and environment - to name just a few that are emphasized by the European Union.
In order to meet these major challenges, we need to build a society that enhances the development of 21st century skills in lifelong learning. 21st century skills encompass not only technical and domain-specific skills, but also domain-independent meta-skills such as the 4Cs: critical thinking, creativity, communication, and collaboration; all needed to manage the complexity of future problems. On the other hand, dealing with the complexity and uncertainty of tomorrow's problems requires citizens capable of developing their knowledge throughout their lives. In this context, technology can play a key role in generating new learning environments that support learners across both formal and informal learning contexts, facilitating them in developing and practicing 21st century skills to face the challenges of the future.
This year, the European Conference on Technology-Enhanced Learning (EC-TEL) aims at engaging researchers, practitioners, educational developers, entrepreneurs and policy makers in a joint discussion on how to put science, technology and practice at the service of learning to embrace these challenges on the topic: “Lifelong technology enhanced learning: Dealing with the complexity of 21st century challenges”. We are looking forward to contributions to feed the debate around this topic on many levels; to discuss and demonstrate how both lifelong learning and technology are indeed a solution to deal with future uncertainty and 21st century challenges. We also encourage participants to extend the debate around the role of and challenges for cutting edge 21st century technologies and advances such as artificial intelligence and robots, augmented reality and ubiquitous computing technologies for learning. We welcome papers reflecting on practices and different pedagogical approaches, types of learning settings, and application domains that can benefit from such technologies.
Theoretical and conceptual papers, as well as small-scale and large-scale empirical studies are welcome. Moreover, we encourage participants to conduct their scientific inquiry using emerging best practices from open science detailed in this call for papers.
Venue and Co-location with MEI2018
The venue for this year’s conference is Leeds, a vibrant, modern city and an important academic and economic centre. Leeds attracts visitors for its world class culture, heritage, arts, shopping, food & drink, as well as beautiful countryside and a lively nightlife. Highlights include the Yorkshire Dales, Yorkshire Sculpture Triangle, Royal Armouries Museum and the World Heritage Site of Saltaire. The University of Leeds will be hosting both EC-TEL 2018 (3rd-6th September) and Medical Education Informatics (6th-7th September) and we anticipate a lively exchange between the two co-located conferences, based on shared research and practice interests. To support this EC-TEL 2018 includes a TEL in Healthcare Education stream within the conference itself.
Conference Topics
From both research and innovative practice perspectives the following topics of interest to the conference include, but are not limited to:
Technological underpinning
- Interactive systems
- Mobile, wearable and pervasive technologies
- Robots
- Sensors and sensor networks
- Roomware, ambient displays and ubiquitous devices
- Visualization techniques for learning
- Learning analytics
- Artificial intelligence
- Personalization, user modelling and adaptation
- Context-aware systems
- Recommender systems for TEL
- Adapted learning flow, content and monitoring process
- Augmented and virtual reality
- Serious games, simulations and 3D virtual worlds
- Social computing and social media
- Semantic Web
- Natural language processing and latent semantic analysis
- Remote labs
- Network infrastructures and architectures for TEL
- Cloud Computing in TEL
- Large-scale learning systems
- eLearning specifications and standards
- Interoperability and sharing of devices, tools and architectures
Pedagogical underpinning
- Problem- and project-based learning / Inquiry based learning
- Computer-supported collaborative learning
- Collaborative knowledge building
- Inquiry-based learning
- Game-based and simulation-based learning
- Story-telling and reflection-based learning
- Learning design and design approaches
- Technology-enhanced orchestration of learning
- Communities of learners and communities of practice
- Teaching techniques and strategies for online learning
- Learner affect, motivation and engagement
- Evaluation methods for TEL
Individual, social & organizational learning processes
- Adaptive learning systems
- Cognitive mechanisms in knowledge acquisition and construction
- Self-regulated and self-directed learning
- Reflective learning
- Social processes in teams and communities
- Learning group formation
- Dynamic assessment of learning
- Social awareness
- Trust and reputation in TEL
- Knowledge management and organizational learning
Learning communities and contexts
- Schools and universities of the future
- Formal education: initial (K-12, higher education), post-initial (continuing education)
- Vocational training
- Workplace learning
- Lifelong learning
- Digitalisation as Driver for Lifelong Learning
- Informal and non-formal learning
- Ubiquitous learning
- Seamless learning
- Domain-specific Technology-Enhanced Learning
- Global learning communities
Open Learning Arrangements
- Massive Open Online Courses (MOOC)
- Open educational resources (OER)
- Learning Networks
- Teacher Networks
- Bring your own Device (BYOD)
- Learning ecologies, learning ecosystems, fitness and evolvability of learning environments
- Business models for TEL
TEL in developing countries and for users with special needs
- ICT Inclusion for learning
- Digital divide and learning
- Generation divide and learning
- Education policies
- Promoting learning and employability within disadvantaged groups and communities
- Rural learning
- Accessible learning for all
- Visual, hearing and physical impairments
- Psycho-pedagogic support for users
- Standards about accessibility and learning
Statement on Open Science
This year, and following the lead of other conferences of the community, we want to contribute to the Open Science movement to promote reproducible and verifiable research. With this aim, we encourage participants to conduct their scientific inquiry using Open Science best practices. Here you have some of the best practices you can think about:
- Pre-registration. Results from experimental interventions are more robust when researchers predefine an experimental plan and register it. To do so, we encourage authors to have a look at different organizations such as the Open Science Framework, where you can report pre-registered and exploratory analyses to be reviewed by other researchers before running your intervention.
- Share your data and analysis for replication. Sharing data sources (always anonymized!) as well as the scripts or programs you used to analyze them can help other researchers to replicate or extend your analysis. We encourage authors to share this information through personal web-pages or specialized Web-based platforms such as LearnSphere, Zenodo, Figshare.
Important Dates
Full Papers, Short Papers, Posters & Demonstrations:
- 15 April 2018 - Mandatory submission of an abstract
- 29 April 2018 - Submission of full version
- 27 May 2018 - Notification of acceptance
- 24 June 2018 - Camera-ready versions
Workshop Proposals:
- 8 April 2018 - Submission of workshop proposal
- 6 May 2018 - Workshops notification
- 3 and 4 September 2018 - Workshops
Project Meetings:
- 24 June 2018 - Room reservation for project meetings
- 3, 4, 7 September 2018 - Project Meetings
Conference:
- 24 July 2018 - Early-bird registration ends
- 3 and 4 September 2018 - Workshops
- 5 and 6 September 2018 - Main conference
Doctoral Consortium:
- 22 May 2018 - Doctoral Consortium application submission
- 19 June 2018 - Doctoral Consortium application notification
- 31 July 2018 - Doctoral Consortium reviews
- 28 August 2018 - Doctoral Consortium camera-ready versions
- 3 September 2017 - Doctoral Consortium
* All submission deadlines are 11:59pm UTC-12
Submission Formats
Submissions will be handled through EasyChair (https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=ectel2018). All papers will be reviewed through a double blind review process so, please, upload your papers without any reference to the authors. Accepted papers will be published in the conference proceedings. As every year, we will publish proceedings within Springer “Lecture Notes in Computer Science” (LNCS) Series". The use of supplied template is mandatory: http://www.springer.com/computer/lncs?SGWID=0-164-6-793341-0
- Research Full Papers: max. 14 pages, published in proceedings
- Research Short Papers: max. 6 pages, published in proceedings
- Practitioner Full Papers: max. 14 pages, published in ceur-ws.org proceedings
- Practitioner Short Papers: max. 6 pages, published in ceur-ws.org proceedings
- Poster Papers: max. 4 pages, published in proceedings
- Demonstration Papers: max. 4 pages (published in proceedings) plus max. 2 additional pages describing the demo (not published in proceedings)
- Workshop proposals: Online form see subsection below, not published in proceedings
- Industry contributions: up to 1 page industry pitch / presentations / videos
Demonstrations & Posters
Demonstration Submissions
The EC-TEL Demonstration session is your chance to fully engage EC-TEL attendees at a personal level by letting them see, touch, squeeze, or hear your visions for the future of TEL, or demonstrate highly interactive ‘TEL in Action’ (e.g. implemented tools, or real-time learning experiences). We expect that your demonstration will be a reliably running prototype of your vision that is ready to be tried out, questioned and interacted with.
You need to submit a concise scientific description of your research prototype, clearly showing how your technological innovation realises a clear learning innovation. This needs to be in a paper that is a maximum 4 pages long including references that will be published in the EC-TEL 2018 proceedings if accepted (plus max. 2 additional pages describing the demo but not published in the proceedings). Specifically, we expect the following sections: (1) Pedagogical background, (2) Technological Background, (3) Use case (explain a use case that you will use to demonstrate the use of your proposal during the demo-shoot), (4) Results and Outcomes achieved (Optional). Demonstration submissions that complement an EC-TEL Paper submission are welcomed.
Poster Submissions
Posters report on significant work in progress. We are planning a poster session in which you can present your work and elicit feedback from EC-TEL participants. Please submit a paper up to a maximum of 4 pages long including references describing your work and the results that you plan to achieve until September 2018. Posters will be published in the EC-TEL 2018 proceedings if accepted.
Demo & Posters at the conference venue
At the conference, all accepted demonstrations will participate in the EC-TEL 2018 Demo-Pitch Competition. You should be ready to present an elevator pitch that convinces the audience to vote for your demonstration. The participants of the EC-TEL Poster and Demo Session will vote for the best EC-TEL demo/prototype as well as for the best poster in this session. The winners will be awarded during the conference. IMPORTANT: Videos are not allowed during the pitch and will be directly disqualified.
Additionally, all poster and demonstration presenters will have the opportunity to create an ePoster to complement their paper poster or demo presentation. The ePosters will be created using Learning Toolbox, which allows you to create a rich and interactive ePoster containing rich elements such as videos, images, audio, apps, presentations, twitter feeds and links to online resources. Your ePoster will have both a physical and virtual presence at the conference and participants will be able to view and interact with your ePoster on their mobile devices and laptops. This is not a PDF online – this is a living learning resource that you can continue to share, update and use after the conference. To find out more about this new approach to ePosters you can view our webpages and videos at http://ltb.io/eposters/ or browse the EC-TEL 2017 ePosters at https://my.ltb.io/#/showcase/ec-tel
Industry & Practice Track
This year EC-TEL intends to have an innovation-driven industry track which will be integrated with the research papers track to provide opportunities for synergies and interactions between the industry and academia. The aim is to give companies a practical grasp on research results and to provide researchers with a forum to become aware of industry perspectives and deployment settings. Building a common understanding, both communities will be able to identify a roadmap for translating research into practice to empower and innovate education.
The industry track is designed to be highly practical and interactive, fostering a dialogue on 21st century education innovation challenges. Consequently, two types of contributions will be accepted:
- Industry pitches from TEL companies;
- Practitioner papers from TEL practitioners and professionals.
Industry Pitches:
TEL industries are invited to submit short abstract (1 page) in form of “pitches” using the conference submission site. The abstract should describe an important 21st century issue that is being addressed, demonstrated or expected impact, digital solution with an appropriate underlying method/methodology, and lessons learned. In addition, the abstract should specify the practical activity that will involve the attendees together with the discussion/reflection highlights that will accompany this activity and the take home message for the audience; presenters are expected to offer an “experience” rather than a standard presentation.
Each industry pitch will be required to prepare an e-poster by making creative use of media, such as videos, images, sound, or practical demonstration, to facilitate comprehension and raise impact. All industry pitches will be presented as e-posters during the main conference to popularise industry projects and enable attendees to become aware of industry needs, strategies and expectations.
Based on the short abstracts and the accompanying e-posters, several industry pitches will be selected for oral presentations at the main conference. The “best” industry pitch will be voted by the conference attendees.
Practitioner Papers:
To encourage presentations that address real world problems, EC-TEL invites practitioner paper submissions. They should address the application, commercial aspects or practical challenges in innovating education through technology, in particular in the context of the conference there ‘Lifelong technology enhanced learning: Dealing with the complexity of 21st century challenges’.
Practitioner papers should be based on a practical use of technology in a learning environment with an expected pedagogical value. They should include description of:
- Context for the project (including aims and key challenges addressed);
- Digital solution (including design rationale and practical implementation);
- Practical deployment (including description of the practical context in which the digital solution has been deployed, stakeholder involvement, evaluation, if appropriate);
- Lessons learnt (including, as appropriate, one or more positive or negative issues such as validation of the expected impact, practical constraints and enablers, user adoption, cost benefit analysis);
- Open challenges (what issues require further attention).
Practitioner papers will follow the submission format for the main conference:
- Long papers (14 pages) should present substantial work that covers all points listed above;
- Short papers (6 pages) can present work in progress that focuses on some points listed above.
All submissions should clearly articulate the key contribution in terms of the value of the practical experience to the design and deployment of technologies to innovate learning.
The practitioner papers will be submitted following the research papers deadline, through the EasyChair (https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=ectel2018). Accepted papers will be published as companion to the EC-TEL proceedings in ceur-ws.org and linked on the EA-TEL.eu website and presented during the main conference.
Workshops
EC-TEL 2018 offers the opportunity to host half-day or full-day workshops. Organizers interested in coordinating a workshop are requested to submit a proposal by filling out this form (https://goo.gl/78SvXJ), no later than 8 April 2018. Successful proposals will be confirmed by 6 May 2018.
Workshop organizers are encouraged to propose innovative and interactive formats, which will be given priority in the selection process. The workshop selection will be handled competitively: proposals will be ranked according to their fit with EC-TEL 2018 conference topics, innovativeness, extent of interaction, overall quality, and comprehensiveness of planning.
Workshop organizers must indicate whether they plan their workshops as full-day or half-day events and provide a preferred workshop day (either 3rd or 4th Sept 2018). Due to space restrictions, we cannot guarantee to meet these preferences.
We plan to support the workshop dissemination by including the workshop timelines and links to their websites on the EC-TEL 2018 conference website. Accepted workshops are expected to launch their websites latest by 1 June 2018.
The workshop’s organisation timeline needs to indicate at least their submission and notification dates. The submission date should be around mid-late June. The notification date must be no later than 15 July 2018, because the early-bird registration for EC-TEL participants ends on 24 July 2018.
Identification of workshop participants, solicitation of workshop contributions and publication of workshop outcomes will be handled by the workshop organizers independently. In publishing the workshop contributions, workshop organizers are encouraged to target high-quality publication outlets (international impact-rated journals, including special issues within them).
Healthcare Education
This year’s conference theme (lifelong technology enhanced learning) is highly relevant to healthcare, where there is an increasing overlap between the needs of healthcare education and the delivery of healthcare services using technology.
Leeds Institute of Medical Education, as one of the hosting organisations of EC-TEL, and Health Education England (HEE) will be organizing a healthcare education stream within the main EC-TEL Conference. This will provide the opportunity for a wide range of stakeholders (healthcare practitioners, educators, patients, policy makers, researchers and industry) to explore how technology can support healthcare education, continuing professional development and practice.
Further details of the activities and speakers in this stream will be announced on the conference website. All EC-TEL conference participants will be welcome to participate in the healthcare education activities.
Project Meetings
In addition to the regular sessions and workshops, EC-TEL offers a unique opportunity for European Projects in TEL to hold face-to-face meetings. Please contact the local organization chair (t.treasure-jones@leeds.ac.uk) at your earliest convenience to book meeting rooms.
Doctoral Consortium
The EC-TEL Doctoral Consortium brings together Ph.D. candidates working on topics related to Technology Enhanced Learning providing them an exceptional opportunity to present, discuss, and receive feedback on their research in an interdisciplinary and international atmosphere. Prominent professors and researchers in the field of Technology Enhanced Learning will provide formative feedback to the selected papers through the review process and contribute actively to discussions at the workshop. The Doctoral Consortium will take place 3rd of September, just before the EC-TEL 2018 conference.
The intention of this doctoral consortium is to support and inspire Ph.D. candidates during their ongoing research efforts. Therefore, it is necessary that participants will have neither achieved their Ph.D. degree nor officially submitted their thesis before the doctoral consortium (September 2018). To enforce this rule we require that the participants disclose their expected graduation date and their advisor's name when submitting.
Interested Ph.D. candidates are requested to upload their submissions by 22 May 2018 to https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=dcectel2018
Eligible submissions to EC-TEL Doctoral Consortium need to address the following elements:
- A clear formulation of the research question.
- An identification of the significant problems in the field of research within the TEL domain..
- An outline of the current knowledge of the problem domain, as well as the state of existing solutions.
- A presentation of any preliminary ideas, the proposed approach and the results achieved so far.
- A sketch of the applied research methodology.
- A description of the Ph.D. project's contribution to the problem solution in the TEL domain.
- A discussion of how the suggested solution is different, new, or better as compared to existing approaches to the problem.
The maximum length of DC submissions is 6 pages. Candidates are kindly requested to make use of the supplied Springer template: http://www.stage.sgw.springer.com/computer/lncs?SGWID=0-164-6-793341-0
Additionally, submissions need to include a separate sheet (1 page) containing the following information:
- A statement of the particular issues, problems, or challenges in your dissertation; research areas that you want to discuss; types of feedback that might be particularly useful,
- A list of members of the ECTEL 2018 Program Committee who you think would be able to provide a particularly useful perspective or feedback on your work,
- A letter of recommendation from your dissertation supervisor/advisor. It must include an assessment of the current status of your work, and an expected date for dissertation completion.
All submissions will be reviewed after acceptance by at least two senior researchers and one of the other accepted doctoral candidates. Additionally, two discussants, members of the doctoral consortium committee, will be appointed to each paper. Discussant comments will be followed by a plenary discussion of the paper. At the end of the consortium there will be a general discussion, including a brainstorming session about current and future research topics in the area.
Accepted candidates should prepare:
- An introductory pitch about themselves and their Ph.D. project for the introductory session. Duration: 60 sec max.
- A 15-20 minute presentation of their Ph.D. project to be used for introducing discussion about their project and its main issues during the small group sessions.
- Students are also invited to prepare a poster about their Ph.D. for the EC-TEL 2018 poster session.
The accepted submissions to the Doctoral Consortium will be published in CEUR Workshop proceedings: http://ceur-ws.org/.
Submissions should be uploaded to: https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=dcectel2018
Important dates:
- 22 May 2018 - Doctoral Consortium application submission
- 19 June 2018 - Doctoral Consortium application notification
- 31 July 2018 - Doctoral Consortium reviews
- 28 August 2018 - Doctoral Consortium camera-ready versions
- 3 September 2018 - Doctoral Consortium
Further information will become available at the Doctoral Consortium section of the EC-TEL 2018 Website.
Conference Organization
Details on the Conference Organization Committee can be found here.