EDULEARN18: 10th Annual Conference on Education and New Learning Technologies
2nd – 4th July 2018, Palma de Mallorca, Spain
EDULEARN is one of the largest international education conferences for lecturers, researchers, technologists and professionals from the educational sector. Every year the conference brings together more than 800 experts from 80 countries to present their projects and share their knowledge on teaching and learning methodologies and educational innovations.
Antonio Gracia, a member of the EduLearn organising committee, opened the conference. He set the tone through his narrative of educational change and finding ways to succeed in an ever-changing landscape.
Sunanna Chand (Remake Learning) gave an insightful keynote on the fourth Industrial Revolution due to rapid technological advances. Organic communication is needed rather than hierarchical communication to solve complex challenges through collaborative solutions and a network lens for social change (Ogden, 2016) that ‘keeps learners at the centre’. You can see the website www.remakelearning.org and subscribe to their newsletter.
Eric Mazur (Harvard University) conducted a captivating keynote on students’ first exposure and their engagement with learning outside the classroom (flipped learning). He introduced a fascinating social learning network tool entitled ‘Perusall’ (https://perusall.com) that facilitates student engagement with learning material that can be integrated into learning management systems. An asynchronous system that has the ability to prepare students in and out of class through a combination of intrinsic and extrinsic drivers.
With themes ranging from ‘Assessment of Student Learning’ to ‘Virtual Reality in Education’ and on to ‘Leadership and Management in Education’, there was something for everyone.
Stimulating perspectives from the conference included:
- Gamification of assessment practice in higher education to affect learner behaviour and attitudes (Bedwell et al 2012; Lander)
- Mental health and the impact on online retention
- Conceptual, open-ended tasks for use with learner analytics
- Personal academic tutor training model in skills, data dashboards, resilience and boundaries
- Change management and quality assurance to integrate multiple stakeholders in a shared transnational joint degree programme
- Active learning-focused teaching in a digital future classroom incorporated zoned teaching areas where critical thinking, social interaction and investigative skills could be engaged with on a rotational or student needs driven basis
- Innovative and creative approaches to student learning. Including: google classroom, multi-modal formative feedback, I-poems to support Personal Academic Tutoring.
Want to know more, see
Bedwell, W. L., Pavlas, D., Heyne, K., Lazzara, E. H., & Salas, E. (2012). Toward a taxonomy linking game attributes to learning: An empirical study. Simulation & Gaming: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 43, 729-760.
Landers, Richard. (2015). Developing a Theory of Gamified Learning. Simulation & Gaming. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/268632276_Developing_a_Theory_of_Gamified_Learning DOI 10.1177/1046878114563660.
Ogden, C., (2016) Thinking Like A Network. Interaction Institute for Social Change. February 9. http://interactioninstitute.org/thinking-like-a-network-2/
Advance notice of next year’s conference – EduLearn19 will be the 11th International Conference. It will be held in Spain in July 2019.
Authored by: Catriona Robinson, Lerverne Barber & Kerry Whitehouse