Scaling educational innovation in higher education is difficult. Besides of managerial support and organizational commitment, developing a practice of learning design as process modelling is among its core success factors. With the increasing digitization and globalization of industrial societies, increasingly there is a demand to develop relevant skills. Among the many slogans related to these new basic skills is computational thinking. In this article, I focus on the question, why is computational thinking not just a learning objective for students but also a capacity of educators?

Last month I posted the call for papers for the ECTEL Conference in Leeds. This year the motto of the conference is Lifelong technology enhanced learning. The ECTEL progam chairs recently announced the keynotes for the conference.

• Allison Littlejohn (Open University, UK) - "Professional Lifelong Learning".
• Carolyn P Rosé (Carnegie Mellon University, USA) - "Lifelong Learning in a Web Scale Opportunity Space".
• David Wortley (CEO and Founder of 360in360) - "The impact of disruptive digital technologies on education, medicine, health and well-being".

The three topics match nicely the scope of ECTEL from lifelong learning through scaling technology enhanced learning all the way to realworld and industry applications. Find more details about the keynotes on ECTEL's website.

If your are working and researching in the field of technology-enhanced learning, there is still a little time left for submitting your contribution. The submission cutoff date is 15 April 2018.

In case your busy with your Ph.D., then you should also consider joining the ECTEL Doctoral Consortium, which has a separate call and a application deadline on 22 May 2018.

This year ECTEL is aligned with the Medical Education Informatics conference (MEI18), which creates a nice opportunity for participating to both conferences with minimum overhead.

In my previous post I announced the EC-TEL Doctoral Consortium.

In addition to the EC-TEL, the European Association of Technology Enhanced Learning (EATEL) also hosts a week-long doctoral training event:

The EATEL Summer School on Technology Enhanced Learning

This year the summer school is perfectly aligned with the Doctoral Consortium's submission deadline on 22nd May. Therefore, I will be present at the EATEL summer school and host a workshop on preparing submissions to the Doctoral Consortium and how to prepare for maximum benefit. The workshop targets at Ph.D. candidates in or shortly after their initial orientation phase.

Moreover, the EATEL Summer School awards the first

Martin Wolpers Student Award

to a promising early stage researcher in the field of technology-enhanced learning.

Additionally, the EATEL Summer School has a very interesting program focusing on the burning challenges of technology-enhanced learning. Check the EATEL Summer School's Homepage for more details and the full programme for the week.

UPDATE: The application deadline has been extended!

Next Monday (12th March 2018) is the deadline for applying for the EATEL Summer School. Be quick and secure your place!

On 3rd September 2018 I have the honour to chair the Doctoral Consortium at the 13th European Conference on Technology Enhanced Learning (ECTEL2018) - please also visit my previous post on EC-TEL.

The ECTEL Doctoral Consortium accepts online submissions until 22 May 2018.

The EC-TEL Doctoral Consortium brings together Ph.D. candidates working on topics related to Technology Enhanced Learning providing them an exceptional opportunity to present, discuss, and receive feedback on their research with experts in the field in an interdisciplinary and international atmosphere. Prominent professors and researchers in the field of Technology Enhanced Learning will provide formative feedback to the selected papers through the review process and contribute actively to discussions at the workshop.

The intention of this doctoral consortium is to support and inspire Ph.D. candidates during their ongoing research efforts. The doctoral consortium is embedded into the main conference through a poster session that provides Ph.D. candidates the unique opportunity to get valuable feedback on preliminary work from the community.

Please refer to the call for contributions on the EC-TEL website.

In November launches the 17th edition of the World Conference on Mobile and Contextual Learning in Chicago, IL. The conference accepts scientific contributions until 30 April 2018 through its online submission platform.

mLearn is the leading international conference on mobile and contextual learning, organised by IAmlearn. The conference takes place at a different venue each year, and has been hosted in places such as Finland, Australia, South Africa, Qatar, Canada, Cyprus, and Turkey, among other locations. This year's conference will be hosted by Concordia University Chicago.

The overarching theme for mLearn 2018 is:

Mobilized Learning: Pedagogical and Technogical Innovation for Teaching & Learning

Check mLearn's call for papers for more details and topics.

Grab your mLearn Starter Kit and get started with your mLearn submission.