Theme : Open Learning and Teaching in Educational Communities.

The European Conference on Technology Enhanced Learning (EC-TEL) is a unique opportunity for researchers, practitioners, and policy makers to address current challenges and advances in the field. Through EC-TEL, established and emerging researchers as well as practitioners, entrepreneurs, and technology developers explore new collaborations, strengthen networks, and complement their core expertise.

Educational arrangements in our modern society are increasingly characterized by openness in terms of participation, of institutionalisation as well as of tools, devices and resources used. We see shifts between formal, non-formal and informal learning. Learners come together in different social settings and communities (such as in groups in schools, teams in a company, or in informal communities of learners). They share and co-create educational resources and interact with an ever increasing number of open educational resources. Learning communities differ in dimension from local ones, through distributed groups up to global communities (as witnessed by the emerging MOOCs paradigm). The learners use multiple computational tools and devices, often at the same time (e.g. tablets and smartphones for individual learning, interactive tables and electronic whiteboards for collaboration, or mobile technologies for taking learning outside the classroom). Access to the open educational arrangements takes place in a mobile ubiquitous fashion.

There is a pressing need to understand how learning in such open educational communities happens and how learning and teaching technology can support in this context. To address these challenges the theme of EC-TEL 2014 is "Open Learning and Teaching in Educational Communities".

http://ectel2014.httc.de