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*** 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 
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IMPORTANT INFORMATION – COVID-19 STATEMENT
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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.


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CALL FOR PAPERS
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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 a!
 nd 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”. 


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CONFERENCE TOPICS
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>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


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STATEMENT OF OPEN SCIENCE 
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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.

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IMPORTANT DATES
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*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

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SUBMISSION FORMATS
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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


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RESEARCH PAPERS
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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.


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POSTER & DEMO PAPERS
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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. 

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IMPACT PAPERS (formerly known as Practitioner papers)
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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.


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WORKSHOPS
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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 
suffi!
 cient 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).
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PROJECT MEETINGS
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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 (k...@ph-heidelberg.de) at your 
earliest convenience to book meeting rooms.


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DOCTORAL CONSORTIUM
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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.


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CONFERENCE ORGANISATION 
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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

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