Opportunities

Educational technology research and development (ETRD), a bi-monthly publication of the Association for Educational Communications & Technology, is accepting papers for its special issue: Teachers' digital competencies in higher education: Shifting to a blended future

Focus & Scope

In response to these ongoing field issues and catalysed by the GOT, ETRD recently published a special issue “Shifting to Digital: Informing the Rapid Development, Deployment, and Future of Teaching and Learning” (Lin & Johnson, 2021). One of the key messages for future research was that it is not clear what should be covered in the support and training of teachers for the digital shift (An, 2021). In the current special issue, we would like to take a next step and specifically consider areas where a better understanding of teachers' digital competencies are needed. This will focus on issues of how to support changes in higher education instructors' practice, after the GOT and as digital technology continues to evolve. In particular, there is a key need to better understand competencies around online and blended learning, as these are not well addressed in existing competency frameworks. An example of questions on this issue is An’s (2021) response to Phillipsen et al.’s (2019) paper. Phillipsen et al. (2019) presents a framework comprising what should be addressed for successful instructor professional development. However, An (2021) notes that “more research is needed to build a common understanding of the essential knowledge, skills, and competences for online teaching and to elaborate and expand the framework.” It is this space that will be explored in the proposed special issue.

To explore teachers’ digital competencies to support digital shifts in higher education post-GOT, it is envisioned that this special issue will include a variety of studies addressing these issues, such as:

• Digital competencies of instructors in higher education, e.g. exactly which digital competencies are needed in higher education to support learning in the post-GOT age,
• Development of competencies for specific instructor profiles,
• Development of instructors' digital competencies in response to outcomes and challenges of the pandemic (e.g., flexibility, autonomy of students or inequities of learning online),
• Factors relating to and impacting on competencies, such as instructors' pedagogical beliefs, policy planning, professional development, leadership, preparing students for future work, etc.,
• Instructors’ future blended learning designs and expectations of digital technology use, and 
• Instructors’ competencies to ensure students have equitable access to quality learning experiences. 

Authors should submit a proposal, in the form of a 250-300 word abstract, a tentative title, author(s) information, keywords and references by March 31, 2022. Early submissions are encouraged. 

Read the full call on ETRD's website for additional information: https://www.springer.com/journal/11423/updates/20096018

Deadline to submit final abstracts: March 30, 2022