Dear Colleagues,

Technology-enhanced learning (TEL) (including mobile and immersive learning) encompasses a rich and diverse history in all kinds of educational settings. It has faced many challenges (Lally & Traxler, 2016; Traxler & Lally, 2016) and yet offers many opportunities to improve the quality of both local and global education (Sclater and Lally, 2018). It is uniquely interdisciplinary (from art and design education through to medicine and beyond), challenges us to work collaboratively in an age of individual diversity, and cuts across boundaries in all spheres of life, yet sometimes intrudes in ways that are ethically and politically challenging.

Cox famously asked of TEL (in schools): ‘Do we know what we need to know?’ (Cox & Marshall, 2007).  The same question must now urgently be asked about TEL and higher education.

As researchers and teachers we are living in unprecedented times. This Special Issue is a response to the major challenges that we face as educators, learners, teachers, and researchers.  It is the aspiration of the Editors and Education Sciences that it will act as a beacon to those wishing to contribute towards addressing the research challenges that are currently facing us and communicate to our fellow researchers and teachers our insights and findings. It is hoped that these papers will act as a handbook to those wishing to integrate TEL even more effectively into their learning and teaching activities in the months and years to come. We welcome fully developed papers (up to 10,000 words) and shorter articles that explore any of the following:

• Accounts of a major achievement of TEL and how it can be used to meet the challenges of the current unprecedented period;
• Reflections on the recent directions of TEL and identification of trends, together with suggestions about how these trends might be suitably developed further to address present and future challenges;
• Identification and elucidation of the major challenges facing TEL;
• The risks and threats to high-quality integration of humanistic TEL and how these might be overcome or mitigated;
• High-quality research reports of new work in TEL and analysis of its significance in relation to the demands of the current educational climate;
• Reviews of the global context of TEL linked to specific studies/reports of recent research;
• Research-oriented reports of any aspect of TEL that is linked to addressing the unprecedented challenges of the current period;
• Other TEL-related research that is relevant to the aims of the Special Issue, by negotiation with the Editors;
• Meta-analyses of TEL-related research that is relevant to the aims of the Special Issue.

References

Cox, M. J. and Marshall, G. (2007) ‘Effects of ICT: do we know what we should know?’, Education and information technologies, Springer, vol. 12, pp. 59–70 [Online].
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Gail-Marshall-2/publication/226750538_Effects_of_ICT_Do_we_know_what_we_should_know/links/59fdf9ac458515d0706aa8c9/Effects-of-ICT-Do-we-know-what-we-should-know.pdf
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10639-007-9032-x

Lally, V. and Traxler, J. (2016) ‘TEL - the crisis and the response: an introduction’, Interactive Learning Environments, vol. 24, no. 5, pp. 935–937 [Online].
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/10494820.2015.1128203
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/305628674_TEL_-_the_crisis_and_the_response_an_introduction
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/10494820.2015.1128203

Sclater, M. and Lally, V. (2018) ‘Foreword: Technologies, learning and culture across disciplines: International perspectives’, Research in Comparative and International Education, SAGE Publications, vol. 13, no. 1, pp. 3–6 [Online].
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1745499918770504
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1177/1745499918770504

Traxler, J. and Lally, V. (2016) ‘The crisis and the response: after the dust had settled’, Interactive Learning Environments, vol. 24, no. 5, pp. 1016–1024 [Online].
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/294735732_The_crisis_and_the_response_after_the_dust_had_settled
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/10494820.2015.1128216
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/10494820.2015.1128216

Prof. Dr. Vic Lally
Dr. Madeleine Sclater
Guest Editors

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