Colleagues have asked me to pass along this call for participation/proposals, and I thought it important to share here.

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Hello colleagues,

What does hope look like in your work as an educator in higher education?

Rather than a conventional conference event, we are inviting educators in Higher Education (in the broadest sense) to contribute one image (a photograph, artwork, drawing, collage, or other visual) that says something about how you conceptualise or practise hope in higher education, accompanied by a short written, audio, or video reflection. Across the two-week symposium, contributions will form a collective online collage, alongside asynchronous and live discussions, keynote presentations, and creative workshops. We are interested in hope in all its complexity, and your contributions do not need to present polished examples of good practice; uncertainty, questions, things that have not quite worked, and commentaries on the limits of hope are also very welcome.

We know everyone is busy, so with this longer online format, you can be as involved as it suits you: dip into some live sessions, browse and comment on others’ contributions, join a creative workshop on teaching, take part in discussion, or simply come along to listen to one of the keynote conversations. We hope there will be something for everyone.

The symposium is free.

Please register your interest by 10 September 2026.

Full details, themes and the registration form are here:
https://perc.ac.nz/wordpress/pedagogies-of-hope-in-higher-education/

Thanks very much.

The Hope in Higher Education Research Team

A/P Alice Beban; A/P Elaine Khoo; Dr. Clare Mouat; Dr Lisa Vonk and the Hope Collective

Below is a call for proposals from the Online Learning Journal (OLJ), drawn from the full announcement:

State of the Science: Evidence Synthesis in Open, Distance, and Digital Education (ODDE)

Systematic Reviews, Meta-Analyses, and Meta-Syntheses on Key Questions in ODDE

Target publication: Online Learning Journal (OLJ), Vol. 30, No. 3 (2026)

Guest Editors:

• Olaf Zawacki-Richter <olaf.zawacki.richter@uni-oldenburg.de>
• Melissa Bond <melissa.bond@ucl.ac.uk>
• Richard West <rickwest@byu.edu>
• Florence Martin <fmartin3@ncsu.edu>

Proposal Deadline: November 30, 2025
Full Manuscript Deadline: February 16, 2026
Expected Publication: November 1, 2026

Rationale for Special Issue

In recent years, the number of evidence syntheses published in the field of education has increased significantly. By consolidating diverse bodies of research, systematic reviews and meta-analyses provide scholars and practitioners with a more comprehensive and reliable understanding of what is known in a rapidly evolving field, as well as informing policy. However, recent umbrella reviews and large-scale meta-analyses indicate that the overall quality of such reviews in the areas of Open, Distance, and Digital Education (ODDE) and educational technology remains uneven (Bond et al., 2024; Buntins et al., 2024, Zawacki-Richter et al., 2025). Common concerns include insufficient transparency in reporting methodological steps, lack of adherence to established review protocols, and weaknesses in the synthesis of empirical results. These issues reduce the trustworthiness, rigor, and replicability of review findings, which are essential for building cumulative knowledge in online learning research.

Aims and Scope of Special Issue

The Online Learning Journal invites submissions for a special issue dedicated to systematic, meta-analytic, and meta-synthetic reviews, umbrella reviews, and scoping reviews that consolidate what is known—and what remains uncertain—about critical topics in online, open, digital, and distance education (ODDE).

This issue seeks to:

• Map the evidence base across key domains in digital education.
• Quantitatively or qualitatively synthesize findings to inform research, design, methods, and policy.
• Highlight gaps and set future research agendas.
• Address weaknesses in methods outlined above
• Strengthen OLJ’s position as a leading venue for integrative scholarship.

OTESSA has two calls for special issue papers:

• Mapping Terminology, Theory, Policy, and Resources Across Key Areas of Impact In Educational Technology.
• Supporting and Understanding Access to Research Funding in Education, Educational Technology, and Open: Exploring Challenges and Opportunities

Call for Papers: Special Issue on Mapping Terminology, Theory, Policy, and Resources Across Key Areas of Impact In Educational Technology

Co-Editors: Mariel Miller, Valerie Irvine, Michele Jacobsen, & Stephanie Moore

Interested authors are invited to submit manuscripts for Theory, Policy, and Resource Papers to the Journal by January 15, 2025.

Proposal soft deadline for consideration on an Index Paper author panel (described below): December 1, 2025. Successful panel members will be notified by January 15, 2025.

We strongly encourage submissions from authors who identify as belonging to structurally marginalized groups.

Response papers will be considered from date of issue publication until October 1, 2025 for continuous publication in the issue before December 31, 2025

Guidelines for submission are in the following section.

Statement of flexibility: “The proposed deadlines are not fixed and any potential author(s) are encouraged to reach out to the editors at any stage to determine if their proposal can be reviewed for inclusion.”

This special issue centres on several high impact areas in educational technology. These include merging learning modalities, learning spaces, open education, artificial intelligence, microcredentials, digital literacy, and IDDEA for Ed Tech (inclusion, decolonization, diversity, equity, and accessibility) (Educause, 2024). As research and practice of Educational Technologies evolve at a rapid pace, this special issue aims to consolidate and synthesize information in key topic areas. By bringing together diverse perspectives and expertise in these areas, this special issue aims to advance understanding and facilitate effective dialogue within the field.

Topics of interest include:

• Learning Modalities, replacing the strict binary of online vs. face-to-face instruction with numerous variations of interaction, including online and face-to-face concurrently, consecutively, or both.
• Open Education, including elimination of barriers to opportunities and recognition for participation in education
• Artificial intelligence (AI), including Generate AI and AI-Enabled Applications for Learning for education in terms of content creation, communication, and learning.
• Microcredentials, offering flexible and modular approaches to education
• Learning Spaces: physical and virtual environments designed to support and enhance the learning experience
• Digital Literacy, in terms of competencies to effectively and critically navigate, evaluate, and create information using a range of digital technologies.
• IDDEA in Ed Tech (Inclusivity, Diversity, Decolonization, Equity and Accessibility), addressing the critical need to ensure that educational technology advances these principles

Papers in this issue should be short so as to be digestible for quick understanding of key terms, concepts, theories, policies, and resource reviews. Authors are encouraged to highlight key research and practice papers, or to author them separately beyond this special issue, rather than compose long articles here. The following paper types will be considered:

1. Index Paper. (500-1000 words). These papers address the proliferation of terms in a selected trending area by examining and drawing connections between different terminologies. Index papers are authored by a panel of experts on the topic. Index papers are comprised of entries, each addressing a term for the focus topic. Entries should include a definition, alternative and related definitions, key works in the educational technology literature, including seminal papers. Index papers should conclude with critical comments by the author
2. Policy Paper (500-1000 words). Focuses on describing policy implementation related to a trending topic, whether by reviewing multiple policies or providing a detailed description of the implementation of a specific policy. Advances understanding of how policies are applied in practice and their impact on educational technology.
3. Theoretical Framework (500-1000 words). Theory papers focus on theoretical frameworks related to a selected trend, either by providing an overview of relevant theoretical frameworks or detailed review of a selected theory. Theory papers offer a conceptual foundation for future research and practice.
4. Resource Review (500-1000 words). Resource papers offer an overview of multiple resources and/or in-depth review of practical resources related to a selected trend area. Resource papers identify and evaluate tools and materials related to key topic areas.
5. Response Paper (1000-1500 words). These papers are short discourse articles that provide responses to the terminology, policy, or resource reviews. Response papers can be submitted throughout the year and are intended to provoke discussion, offer critiques, and provide additional perspectives on the primary papers.

The special issue will use a continuous publication model, so accepted submissions will be published as soon as they are ready.

Call for Papers: Special Issue on Supporting and Understanding Access to Research Funding in Education, Educational Technology, and Open: Exploring Challenges and Opportunities

Co-Editors: Dr. Valerie Irvine & Dr. Michele Jacobsen

Interested authors are invited to submit a 500-word abstract proposal to Valerie Irvine and Michele Jacobsen (journal@otessa.org) by November 15, 2024. We strongly encourage submissions from authors who identify as belonging to structurally marginalized groups. Guidelines for submission are in the following section.

Contributing authors for successful abstracts will be notified continuously until a soft deadline of December 15, 2024. Final papers of 4000 to 7000 words (including references) will be published continuously from earliest October 2024 through March 2025, though we can be flexible with dates with good communication.

Theme of Special Issue

Despite efforts to create more equitable and inclusive research environments or cultures of support across all the disciplines and types of research, tensions still exist between qualitative vs. quantitative or hard sciences vs. humanities or equity between privileged vs. marginalized researchers and students. A key theme across all these trespasses involves the concept of respect:

• Respect that diverse disciplines of study on university campuses all contribute to society through their own unique discourse, theories, methods, culture, and approaches to knowledge engagement. Comparisons meant to pit one field of study against the other serves to deteriorate our collective understanding of the world and each other. Assumptions that specialized domains can be picked up through a quick database search vs. several years and multiple degrees of immersive and expert study risks undermining decades of knowledge development and is also a waste of time and resources.
• Respect that the social sciences and humanities are equally important to the natural sciences or medical sciences and should be allocated equitable funding. We know that many of the complex issues that are impacting the world today may ultimately be based on science-based phenomenon (such as the increase of the world’s temperature globally), but how we make changes to such crises is primarily a very human one that is based on individual decision-making or cultural trends or expression, which are in the social sciences or humanities.
• Respect that researchers come from diverse backgrounds and may require different approaches to support or evaluation criteria in competitions to be inclusive. This may involve a researcher who experiences the world with a larger obstacles or heavier burdens, such as parents or other types of caregivers, those who experience financial obstacles and may have to work part-time through studies or take their graduate studies part-time, thus making them ineligible for scholarships or reducing their volume of output and, thus, competitiveness, those who experience cultural barriers, such as Indigenous or black researchers, those who are a person with a disability, a disabled person, or a person with a chronic health condition. When those who are abled, privileged, focus on positivist methods from the hard sciences experience a different pathway to research funding support, those reinforced mechanisms become centred in systems, stereotypes, and ultimately change the nature of the understanding of the world around us.
• Respect that knowledge is generated through diverse approaches to research, and that methodologies exist along a continuum of practice. We had hoped that the qualitative vs. quantitative debate was over and we evolved to a better understanding that the types of research questions influence the types of methods used, along with the high value placed on mixed methods and the multiple ways these types of data could be brought together in a way that elevates the overall research. If we continue to perpetuate the value, and funding and publishing, of one type of research over another, we are skewing our understanding of the phenomenon being examined and exposing it more to one type of limitation over another.
• Respect that integrity and fairness must be valued over systems and structures. The rules and processes that occur on a campus were created by individuals and likely edited by later individuals. Contexts change, the world changes, our ability to view these structures as malleable before needs for equity, social justice, and pursuit of excellence.

The field of education and the disciplines of educational technology and open education both have unique experiences in navigating the five barriers to Respect. We encourage authors who are a part of the field of education or any of its sub-disciplines (educational technology, art education, Indigenous education, science education, educational psychology, etc.) to submit proposals to this special issue. Given that we are a journal in educational technology and open education and scholarship does not negate that we share similar barriers to our counterparts in the field of education. We welcome any submissions that push the aforementioned boundaries further. Perhaps there are other barriers and biases about Respect beyond the five mentioned above. Perhaps there are papers to be written about inequity that skirts outside of our field of education and are more centred at the social sciences and humanities level. We welcome all submissions that wish to examine the system we have for supporting and funding research.

Please share with interested colleagues our call for papers for a special collection to be published by the International Journal of Educational Technology in Higher Education.

Submission details and guidelines are available here.

Our societies face enormous economic, demographic, political, ecological, and social challenges. In this environment of uncertainty, doubts about the future of higher education have proliferated, particularly as demographic changes take hold, technology rapidly advances, wealth inequality increases, and climate destabilizes. In the face of these challenges, and in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, many have argued the time is right to not only tinker with the status quo, but to imagine otherwise, to imagine alternative higher education futures that are more hopeful, more equitable, and more just.

This collection invites prospective authors to turn towards reimagining the futures of education, and to contribute scholarship that speculates what higher education at the intersection of justice, hope, and educational technology could look like.

This is not a call for papers grounded in technological solutionism or technological determinism. The educational technology literature is replete with papers which are optimistic about the possibilities of technology. Rather, this call invites writing that imagines higher education and its practices otherwise, writing that engages the imagination from diverse and justice-oriented perspectives. In Houlden and Veletsianos (2022), for example, we noted that hopeful futures are shaped by themes such as “connection, agency and community and individual flourishment” and we have suggested that “hopepunk, solarpunk, and visionary fiction” can serve “as models of storytelling grounded in hope which imagines more liberatory education and learning futures.”

We are especially interested in scholarship that engages critically with educational technology issues while resisting oppression and despair; scholarship that begins with the ongoing undoing of colonial, racist, ableist, patriarchal, heteronormative, capitalist structures of power; and scholarship that invites hope as a practice of change and not as a return to an idealized past.

This collection is open to diverse forms of research and scholarship, including empirical, theoretical, speculative, and anything in-between.

Topics of interest include higher education futures at the intersection of justice, hope, and educational technology that engage with

• Speculative methods and pedagogies
• Indigenous, Black, Queer, and (Dis)ability issues and methods
• Reimagining technology in higher education
• Co-creation with learners and/or other communities
• Local and contextual realities

Research questions of interest may include but are not limited to

• What does the intersection of hope, justice, and educational technology look like, or ought to look like?
• How do current education systems need to transform to enable just and hopeful education futures?
• How can we understand hope and justice in the context of higher education futures?
• What is the role of hope and justice in imagining diverse education futures?
• What are the roles and limits of technology in desirable, just, and hopeful higher education futures?
• In what ways are hopeful and/or just technology-infused higher education futures similar or different across contexts?
• How can hopeful futures be enacted beyond envisioning in higher education systems? For example, how might speculative futures scholarship address problems higher education faces today?
• What do hopeful, speculative futures approaches reveal about current contexts and future orientations for higher education practices and policies?
• What methods might be used to support generative higher education futures that are at the intersection of hope, justice, and educational technology?
• What might empirical approaches to such futures look like within higher education settings?
• Whose voices and perspectives are made explicit in generating hopeful educational futures, and how?

Houlden, S., & Veletsianos, G. (2022). Impossible Dreaming: On Speculative Education Fiction and Hopeful Learning Futures. Postdigital Science and Education. https://doi.org/10.1007/s42438-022-00348-7

Call opens: May 1, 2023

Call closes: October 31, 2023

Guest editors: 
George Veletsianos, Royal Roads University, Canada
Shandell Houlden, Royal Roads University, Canada
Jen Ross, University of Edinburgh, UK
Sakinah Alhadad, Griffith University, Australia
Camille Dickson-Deane, University of Technology Sydney, Australia

Journal of Applied Instructional Design (JAID): Special Issue 2022 Call for  Proposals Rethinking Multimedia Design for Learning 

Special Issue Editors  

Dr. Ahmed Lachheb, Learning Experience Designer, Center for Academic Innovation,  University of Michigan.

Dr. Rebecca M. Quintana, Associate Director, Learning Experience Design, Center for  Academic Innovation and Adjunct Lecturer, School of Education, University of Michigan.

Dr. Chris Quintana, Associate Professor, School of Education, University of Michigan.

Jacob Fortman, Learning Experience Designer and Graduate Certificate Coordinator, Center  for Academic Innovation, University of Michigan.

Email contact for the Special Issue Editors: JAID.multimedia@umich.edu

Introduction 

Multimedia design for learning has been a topic of research and a core professional function  in the instructional design profession since its inception. Much of the research on multimedia  design for learning has been grounded in work such as Mayer (2002) to provide theoretical  models about the cognitive processing of multimedia information and practical guidelines for  using multimedia in learning contexts. However, as technology and modes of instruction  evolve and substantially change over time, the landscape of multimedia research and design  for learning must keep pace with modalities that emerge from new technologies. For  example, Ainsworth (2018) noted that human learning is inherently multi-representational  and that new representational forms are being invented as new educational technologies are  advanced. Yet, most—if not all—well-established principles of multimedia learning are  rooted in empirical research bounded by historical contexts that are different from today’s  21st-century learning landscape, as Hinderliter (2022) and Moore (2021) aptly remarked.

With the rise of technologies such as immersive digital simulations (Lui & Slotta, 2014),  embedded phenomena (Moher, 2006), augmented and virtual reality (Lindgren et al., 2016),  and other forms of interactive media, what counts as “good multimedia design for learning” is  less certain. This calls for a continued inquiry by instructional design and learning sciences  communities to re-examine long-held principles and approaches to support multimedia  design for learning and adequately attend to the affordances and features of new kinds of  technology-enhanced learning environments.

Contributors to this special issue are invited to present their view on how instructional  designers, educators, and researchers should rethink multimedia design for learning in  diverse technological contexts, from an applied research and practice perspectives, through  one of the following topics (although, this list is not exhaustive):

• The challenges and opportunities in adhering to well-established theories and  guidelines of multimedia design for learning as they relate to new representational  forms and technology-enhanced learning environments
• Proposed theoretical revisions or expansions to existing multimedia learning theory  given the modalities and approaches supported by new technologies (e.g., haptic  interactions, grounded and embodied learning, collaboration and remote learning  platforms)
• Potential opportunities and limitations of emerging learning environments (e.g.,  augmented, mixed, and virtual reality) with respect to new types of affordances,  features, and modalities to support educational research and instructional design
• Multimedia design failures and/or successes, and the lessons learned from bounded  or situated design experiences
• Ethical, social, political, or economic considerations in the design of multimedia for  learning in 21st-century learning environments

Submissions from instructional design, learning sciences, and related fields that successfully  present scholarly work in K-12, higher education, and corporate training settings are  welcome. While there is some flexibility, submissions should be between 4,000 to 5,000  words in length (excluding references and appendices). We particularly welcome  submissions that are in line with the following types of submissions:

• Instructional Design Practice 

This is an applied journal serving a practicing community. Our focus is on what  practitioners are doing in authentic contexts and their observed results. These  articles cover topics of broad concern to instructional design practitioners. The  articles should represent issues of practical importance to working designers.

• Research Studies on Applied Instructional Design 

JAID is interested in publishing empirical studies exploring the application of  instructional design principles in applied settings. Quantitative and qualitative studies are welcome.

• Instructional Design/Performance Design Position Papers 

JAID also accepts position papers that attempt to bridge theory and

practice. Examples may include conceptual frameworks and new ideas facing the  instructional design community. The paper must also provide enough information to  allow the replication of the innovation or continuation of the research in other  settings. Position papers must be based in the context of a theoretical framework. Efficacy data is strongly preferred, but not always required, contingent upon the  potential generalizability or value of the innovation.

Important Dates 

*Authors may contact the editorial team (JAID.multimedia@umich.edu) to discuss relevance  and fit prior to submitting their proposals.

Submission Process 

If invited to submit a full manuscript, please prepare submissions according to the JAID  guidelines: https://www.jaid.pub/call

The Journal of Applied Instructional Design (JAID) is a peer-reviewed journal sponsored by  the Association for Educational Communications and Technology (AECT).