[Air-L] Call for papers: The 15th European Conference on Technology-Enhanced Learning (EC-TEL 2020), 14-18 Sep 2020, Heidelberg, Germany

Wed Apr 8 08:01:31 PDT 2020

------------------------------------------------------------------
*** Call for Papers EC-TEL 2020 ***
The 15th European Conference on Technology-Enhanced Learning
ADDRESSING GLOBAL CHALLENGES AND QUALITY EDUCATION
14th-18th September 2020, Heidelberg, Germany
http://www.ec-tel.eu 
------------------------------------------------------------------

------------------------------------------------------------------
IMPORTANT INFORMATION – COVID-19 STATEMENT
------------------------------------------------------------------

To all authors and potential participants of EC-TEL2020: We are aware that the current situation entails a high level of insecurity and unclarity. To provide you with some level of planning we would like to confirm some slight changes of our planning:

We have adapted the submission deadline for abstracts with a new deadline on 6 April, 23:59 AOE. We have decided that a submission of an abstract is not mandatory anymore and research papers without a previous abstract submission will also be accepted for review at the paper deadline on 20 April, 23:59 AOE. However,  you would help us a lot in these times if you could signal your intention to submit a paper by sending a short abstract.

We would like to confirm again that we will have an online event in case the face-to-face conference will not go through. This online-event will give authors an opportunity to present their work. The conference registration rates will be reduced in case we will have only an online event. If possible, we will also have a face-to-face or blended event depending on the future situation.

We will make sure that Springer proceedings will be published no matter in which format the conference will happen.

We are aware that our community is in a special situation since many community members are currently helping other colleagues and their own institutions to prepare the current and upcoming semester for online teaching and learning. We will make sure that there is room during the conference to reflect about the crisis and potential solutions for the future.

------------------------------------------------------------------
CALL FOR PAPERS
------------------------------------------------------------------
The European Conference on Technology-Enhanced Learning (EC-TEL) engages researchers, practitioners, educational developers, entrepreneurs, industry leaders and policy makers to address current challenges and advances in the field. This year’s theme is ADDRESSING GLOBAL CHALLENGES AND QUALITY EDUCATION.

The world today is at a crossroad where several global challenges must be urgently addressed in order to build a more sustainable future. The United Nations Agenda 2030 defined 17 Sustainable Development Goals in which “Quality Education” stands out as one of the most crucial ones (SDG 4). This Sustainable Development Goal seeks to ensure access to equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all, providing citizens with the skills required for individual, and collective well-being in a world of uncertainty and rapid change. In an era mediated by technology and data, applied research in education and especially in technology-enhanced learning are fundamental to meet SDG 4, contribute to other Sustainable Development Goals, such as “Reduced Inequalities” (SDG 10) within and among countries, and act as a bridge between SDG 4 and other SDGs fostering education for a sustainable growth. This not only includes improving student performance and success in general but also supporting disadvantaged and under-represented groups. 

At the same time, 2020 can become a turning point for research and innovation in Europe. This year the Horizon Europe programme is born to replace the successful Horizon 2020 programme, which has been a catalyst for many of the results presented by the EC-TEL community in the last seven years. Horizon Europe is meant to be the cornerstone for researchers and innovators to define their next research lines and obtain new funds for the next seven years. Many research results will surely be presented in future editions of this conference thanks to Horizon Europe. Interestingly, Horizon Europe defines, as one of its fundamental pillars, the need to address Global Challenges, clustered in areas, such as health, culture, creativity and inclusive society, or climate, energy and mobility, among others, and in which education, and more specifically technology-enhanced learning, play a transversal but crucial role.

The European Conference on Technology-Enhance Learning, which celebrates its 15th anniversary this year, is committed to address global challenges and quality education in this call for papers. First, some research articles are expected to contribute to the Sustainable Development Goals, particularly SDG 4 and SDG 10, to help to reduce the existing gaps and inequalities between countries and regions from around the world in terms of inclusiveness, equity, access, and quality of education. Second, the Horizon Europe programme will be present in the conversations of attendees since a significant part of upcoming research and innovation in technology-enhanced learning will be linked to this new programme.

EC-TEL 2020 will be co-located with the 18th “Fachtagung Bildungstechnologien der GI Fachgrupper Bildungstechnologien (DELFI 2020)” (https://delfi-tagung.de/) and the 9th “Fachtagung Hochschuldidaktik Informatik (HDI) des GI Fachbereich Informatik Ausbildung / Didaktik der Informatik”. 

------------------------------------------------------------------
CONFERENCE TOPICS
------------------------------------------------------------------
From both research and innovative practice perspectives the following topics of interest to the conference include, but are not limited to:

*Pedagogical and theoretical underpinning*
- Active learning
- Problem-based learning
- Project-based learning
- Computer-supported collaborative learning
- Computer-supported cooperative work
- Collaborative knowledge building
- Inquiry-based learning
- Exploratory and discovery learning
- Game-based and simulation-based learning
- Storytelling 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 digital learning
- Learner affect, motivation and engagement
- Competency-based education and training
- Knowledge, skills, attitudes and values

*Technological underpinning*
- Mobile, wearable and pervasive technologies 
- Sensors, sensor networks and Internet of Things
- Roomware, ambient displays and ubiquitous devices
- Robots
- Remote and virtual labs 
- Augmented reality, virtual reality and mixed reality
- Serious games, simulations and 3D virtual worlds
- Interactive systems
- Context-aware systems
- Personalised and adaptive learning systems
- Visualisation techniques and dashboards
- Learning analytics
- Artificial intelligence
- Recommender systems
- Natural language processing and latent semantic analysis
- Semantic Web
- Social computing and social media
- Infrastructures and architectures
- Large-scale learning systems
- Specifications and standards
- Interoperability and sharing of devices, tools, architectures and data

*Individual, social & organisational learning processes*
- Cognitive and metacognitive mechanisms in knowledge acquisition and construction
- Self-regulated and self-directed learning
- Reflective learning
- Strategies for the development of 21st century skills
- Computational thinking
- Social processes in teams and communities
- Bring your own device (BYOD)
- Learning group formation
- Assessment of/for/as learning (formative, summative, self-, peer- assessment)
- Social awareness
- Sensemaking and Meaning Making
- Knowledge management and organisational learning

*Ethics, privacy, regulations and policies*
- Ethics and data gathering, storage and processing
- Data privacy
- Regulations and policies in data management

*Learning communities and contexts*
- Formal education: K-12
- Formal education: higher education
- Lifelong learning
- Informal and non-formal learning
- Interprofessional and Interdisciplinary Learning
- Vocational training
- Workplace learning
- Seamless learning
- Teacher education and professionalization
- Wellbeing

*Global teaching and learning*
- Global challenges
- Massive Open Online Courses (MOOC)
- Smart Learning Environments (SLEs)
- Open educational resources (OER)
- Learning Networks
- Teacher Networks
- Learning ecologies, learning ecosystems, fitness and evolvability of learning environments
- Business models

*Quality education for underrepresented groups*
- Digital and generation divide and learning
- Teaching and learning in rural and isolated areas
- Inclusive, equitable and accessible learning
- Standards about accessibility and learning
- Promoting learning and employability within underrepresented groups and communities
- Visual, hearing and physical impairments
- Psycho-pedagogical support for users

------------------------------------------------------------------
STATEMENT OF OPEN SCIENCE 
------------------------------------------------------------------
As last year, we want to encourage Open Science within the EATEL research community. We therefore encourage authors to document their research in a reproducible and verifiable manner, and in general to use Open Science best practices. Two best practices that we specifically would be happy to see in EC-TEL 2020 research papers are:
1) Pre-registration. Results from empirical studies are more robust when researchers predefine a research and analysis plan and register it before data collection. To do so, we encourage authors to use services like AsPredicted (aspredicted.org) and the Open Science Framework (OSF) to preregister their research so that confirmatory and exploratory analyses can be better evaluated. The research manuscript should then include a link to the preregistration document. 
2) Sharing data and code for replication purposes. Sharing data sources (always anonymised!) as well as the scripts or programs you used to analyse them can help other researchers to replicate or extend your analysis. We encourage authors to share this information by providing a link to the data and code in the manuscript.

------------------------------------------------------------------
IMPORTANT DATES
------------------------------------------------------------------

*Research Papers, Impact Papers, Posters & Demonstrations*
6 April 2020 - submission of an abstract as indication to conference organisers (not mandatory)
20 April 2020 - Submission of full version
1 June 2020 - Notification of acceptance
22 June 2020 - Camera-ready versions

*Workshop Proposals*
27 April 2020 - Submission of workshop proposal 
18 May 2020 - Workshops notification
1 June 2020 - Workshops sites launched
14-15 September 2020 - Workshops in Heidelberg

*Doctoral Consortium*
20 April 2020 - advanced PhD candidate application deadline
18 May 2020 - advanced PhD candidate acceptance notification
17 June 2020 - early stage PhD candidate application deadline
1 July 2020 - early stage PhD candidate acceptance notification 
29 July 2020 - Doctoral Consortium reviews
14 September 2020 - Doctoral Consortium
1 December 2020 - Camera-ready version of the improved submission

* All submission deadlines are 11:59pm AOE

------------------------------------------------------------------
SUBMISSION FORMATS
------------------------------------------------------------------
Research, impact, poster and demo paper submissions as well as doctoral consortium submissions will be handled through EasyChair (https://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=ectel2020). Apart from the DC submissions, all papers will be reviewed through a double blind review process, i.e. authors must upload their papers without any reference to themselves or their institutions. 

Accepted research, poster and demo papers will be published in the conference proceedings. As every year, the proceedings will be published within Springer “Lecture Notes in Computer Science” (LNCS) Series. The use of supplied template is mandatory: https://www.springer.com/de/it-informatik/lncs/conference-proceedings-guidelines 

Impact papers have to comply with the LNCS template as well, and will be published in Companion Proceedings, e.g., via CEUR Workshop Proceedings (CEUR-WS). Workshop proposals as well as industry contributions will be handled separately. 

Research Papers: 8-14 pages, published in Conference Proceedings
Poster Papers: max. 5 pages, published in Conference Proceedings
Demonstration Papers: max. 5 pages (published in Conference Proceedings) plus max. 1 additionals page describing the demo (not published in proceedings)
Impact Papers: 6-14 pages, published in Companion Proceedings 
Workshop proposals: online form (see subsection), not published in proceedings
Industry contributions: to be announced

------------------------------------------------------------------
RESEARCH PAPERS
------------------------------------------------------------------
Research papers for EC-TEL 2020 should be 8-14 pages long. No matter the length, research papers are expected to be mature research contributions to the field of technology-enhanced learning. Research papers should clearly define research objectives and questions. In addition, research papers should discuss the state-of-the-art in the area in which the work is framed, present an appropriate research methodology, as well as discuss the results of the research conducted. Preliminary results or work in progress fit very well in the poster paper category. Research papers should highlight their novelty and contribution to the field. Note that it is important for EC-TEL 2020 research papers to consider both technology and learning.

------------------------------------------------------------------
POSTER & DEMO PAPERS
------------------------------------------------------------------
Poster and Demo Papers are short papers that report on research-in-progress. They describe innovative TEL applications (e.g. dashboards, tutor systems, interactive learning technologies, etc.) and are maximum 5 pages long including references. Poster and Demo papers will be published in the EC-TEL 2020 LNCS proceedings if accepted.

The format of the paper must follow the LNCS template and include the following sections: 
Pedagogical background
Technological background
Results and outcomes achieved
Outlook
DEMONSTRATIONS will consist of reliable running prototypes ready to be tried out by end users
When you submit a demo paper you should also submit a 1 page document (not published in the proceedings) with the following information:
Description of the demo 
Set-up requirements for the demo (if any)
Use cases that will be provided during the demo to illustrate the use of the system 

POSTERS: the actual posters will be printed and brought to the conference by the authors of the accepted poster paper.

The Poster and Demo sessions will provide authors with an opportunity to present their work in an interactive fashion and elicit feedback from EC-TEL participants. 

------------------------------------------------------------------
IMPACT PAPERS (formerly known as Practitioner papers)
------------------------------------------------------------------
To encourage presentations that address real world problems or practical use cases, EC-TEL invites both practitioners and researchers to submit impact papers. The impact track aims at sharing thoughts and findings that stem from TEL projects and were transferred into practice and/or at scale including formal or informal pilot studies or iterative design-based research. These papers include the application, implementation, commercial aspects or practical challenges in innovating education through technology, in particular in the context of the EC-TEL conference theme ‘ADDRESSING GLOBAL CHALLENGES AND QUALITY EDUCATION’.

Impact papers should illuminate from a practical point of view how emerging and future learning technologies can be better understood by learners and educators and how they can be used in a meaningful way to enhance human-machine interrelationships and to contribute to efficient and effective education. Thus, impact papers should be based on a practical use of technology for learning to improve, change or enhance learning practice in formal as well as informal learning environments including an expected pedagogical value. The objective is to promote a discussion between research and practice, such that on the one hand, practical experiences and challenges are made known to researchers, and ongoing research is made known to practitioners.

Impact papers should include descriptions of:
Context for the project: What is the context and aim of the project and which key challenges were addressed? How can this be designed and implemented as real world application?
New innovative tools/techniques: How do the new tools/techniques look like? How do these tools transfer learning into practice?
Digital solution: What is the design rationale? How does the practical implementation look like? 
Practical deployment: What is the practical context in which the digital solution has been deployed? How were the stakeholders involved? And how was the project evaluated? 
Lessons learned:
Planning/design: How was the project conceived, structured and designed? How did the planning/design affect the success (or failure) of the project?
Implementation: Which factors were responsible for the success (or failure) of the implementation or deployment of the project? 
Outcomes/impact: How was the success of the project measured? What were positive or negative issues such as validation of the expected impact, practical constraints and enablers, user adoption, cost benefit analysis, generalisability? Did other unexpected or surprising results occur? 
Benefit: How can the benefit be translated into something tangible from which others can learn?
Open challenges: Which issues do require further attention or actions .

Impact papers will follow the submission format of the main conference (LNCS Format), and should be 6-14 pages long, as outlined above, with the length of the paper correlating with the contribution made. 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 impact papers will be submitted following the research papers deadline, through EasyChair. Accepted papers will be published in Companion Proceedings, e.g., via CEUR Workshop Proceedings (CEUR-WS), and presented during the main conference.

------------------------------------------------------------------
WORKSHOPS
------------------------------------------------------------------
EC-TEL 2020 offers the opportunity to host half-day or full-day workshops. Organisers interested in coordinating a workshop are requested to submit a proposal by filling out this form (https://bit.ly/2QYaKkh), no later than 27 April 2020. Successful proposals will be confirmed by 18 May 2020.

Workshops are expected to promote the conference theme –addressing global challenges and quality education– and provide a venue for community building and idea generation for emerging research topics to groups of like-minded researchers and practitioners, further elaborating on how learning technologies can add educational value to the different stakeholders and contribute to efficient and effective education. Workshop organisers are encouraged to propose innovative and interactive formats, which will be given priority in the selection process. The workshop selection will be handled competitively to achieve a balanced workshop program. Ideally, the workshop will comprise different formats, combining newly emerging, currently evolving, and established research topics. Proposals will be ranked according to their fit with EC-TEL 2020 conference topics, innovativeness, extent of interaction, overall quality, and comprehensiveness of planning including an insight on how sufficient submissions and participants could be achieved. In case of overlapping workshops, organisers may be contacted to clearly differentiate the workshops or to merge them. 

Workshop organisers must indicate:
Whether they plan their workshops as full-day or half-day events and provide a preferred workshop day (either 14th or 15th September 2020, although due to space restrictions, we cannot guarantee to meet these preferences)
The workshop’s organisation title and acronym
A list of topics of interest
Motivation on why the workshop is of particular interest at this time
The proposed timeline, including at least the submission deadline (around mid-late June) and notification date (at least two weeks before the end of the early-bird registration).

We plan to support the workshop dissemination by including the workshop timelines and links to their websites on the EC-TEL 2020 conference website. Nevertheless, accepted workshops are expected to launch their websites (latest by 1 June 2020), identify workshop participants, and handle the call for workshop contributions as well as the publication of workshop outcomes. In publishing the workshop contributions, workshop organisers are encouraged to target high-quality publication outlets (international impact-rated journals, including special issues within them).
------------------------------------------------------------------

------------------------------------------------------------------
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 organisation chair Marco Kalz (kalz at ph-heidelberg.de) 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 on 14th of September, just before the EC-TEL 2020 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 2020). Therefore, the participants need to disclose their expected graduation date and their advisor's name when submitting.

The EC-TEL Doctoral Consortium 2020 has now two submission deadlines: 
20 April 2020 for advanced Ph.D. candidates, who seek indepth feedback from the EC-TEL Doctoral Consortium Board
17 June 2020 for early stage Ph.D. Candidates, who want to receive methodological and conceptual feedback on their research ideas. 

Interested Ph.D. candidates are requested to upload their submissions to EasyChair https://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=ectel2020. 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: https://www.springer.com/de/it-informatik/lncs/conference-proceedings-guidelines  Additionally, submissions need to include a separate sheet (1 page) based on the EC-TEL Doctoral Candidate confirmation form. This form needs to be signed by the supervisor of the candidate. The form link will be added soon.

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 2020 poster session.

The accepted submissions to the Doctoral Consortium will be published in CEUR Workshop proceedings: http://ceur-ws.org/. The participants have the opportunity to improve their submission based on the feedback they received from the reviews and during the Doctoral Consortium. Submissions should be uploaded to: https://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=ectel2020

Important dates: 
20 April 2020 - Doctoral Consortium advanced PhD candidate application deadline
18 May 2020 - Doctoral Consortium advanced PhD candidate acceptance notification
17 June 2020 - Doctoral Consortium early stage PhD candidate application deadline
1 July 2020 - Doctoral Consortium early stage PhD candidate acceptance notification 
29 July 2020 - Doctoral Consortium reviews
14 September 2020 - Doctoral Consortium
1 December 2020 - Camera-ready version of the improved submission
Further information will become available at the Doctoral Consortium section of the EC-TEL 2020 Website.

------------------------------------------------------------------
CONFERENCE ORGANISATION 
------------------------------------------------------------------

General Chair:
Maren Scheffel, Open University of the Netherlands, The Netherlands  

Programme Chairs:
María Jesús Rodríguez-Triana, Tallinn University, Estonia
Carlos Alario-Hoyos, Universidad Carlos III Madrid, Spain

Poster and Demonstration Chairs:
Inmaculada Arnedillo-Sánchez, Trinity College Dublin, Ireland
Sebastian Dennerlein, Technische Universität Graz and Know-Center, Austria

Impact Chairs:
Tom Broos, KU Leuven, Belgium
Tracie Farrell Frey, Open University UK, United Kingdom

Workshop Chairs:
Zacharoula Papamitsiou, NTNU, Norway
Adolfo Ruiz Calleja, Universidad de Valladolid, Spain

Doctoral Consortium Chairs:
Christian Glahn, University of Applied Sciences HTW Chur, Switzerland
Kairit Tammets, Tallinn University, Estonia

Local Organisation Chairs:
Marco Kalz, PH Heidelberg, Germany
Joshua Weidlich, PH Heidelberg, Germany

Steering Committee Representative:
Ralf Klamma, RWTH Aachen University, Germany