The EC-TEL conference is the leading European academic conference in Technology Enhanced Learning. In its 7th year the conference was held in Saarbrücken (Germany) from the 18th – 21st September 2012.
The theme of the conference this year was 21st Century Learning for 21st Century Skills and it covered a broad selection of research including:
- Technological underpinning
- Pedagogical underpinning
- Individual, social & organizational learning processes
- Learning contexts and domains
- TEL in developing countries
- TEL, functional diversity and users with special needs
A full list of the subject areas covered is available on the EC-TEL website.
Wordle visualisation of the paper abstracts from EC-TEL 2012
The above visualisation was generated from the abstracts of the main conference papers and is indicative of the research focus of the conference.
Prior to the main conference there were a number of workshops held. The following workshops were attended and they both resulted in interesting and stimulating debate around game-based learning and mobile user experiences respectively.
- PDSG: Pedagogically-Driven Serious Games
- LUX: a creature from far-far-away? A workshop on User Experience, Accessibility and Usability in Learning across Multiple Devices
Some of the key areas of interest highlighted at the overall conference include:
- Massive Online Open Courses (MOOCs) such as Coursera
- Designing learning experiences to foster creativity
- Use of context-aware mobile technologies to aid situated learning
- Learning Analytics as an emerging research area
- Technologies to aid reflection e.g. the EU FP7 MIRROR project
