Call for Papers for a Special Issue of the
IEEE Transactions on Learning Technologies

on

“DESIGNING TECHNOLOGIES TO SUPPORT PROFESSIONAL
AND WORKPLACE LEARNING FOR SITUATED PRACTICE”

Guest Editors:

Viktoria Pammer-Schindler, Graz University of Technology, Austria
Allison Littlejohn, University College London, U.K.
Tobias Ley, Tallinn University, Estonia
Joachim Kimmerle, IWM-KMRC Tuebingen, Germany
Mark J. W. Lee, Charles Sturt University, Australia

Email: tlt-workplacelearning@ieee.org

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( PDF version of this CFP available at https://bit.ly/3iS8I1h )

In an era of global, organizational, and technological change, all of which are transforming the world of work, professional and workplace learning are critical for both employability and organizational competitiveness. Such learning is therefore needed on a greater scale than ever before, and the only way to provide that scale is through the integration of technology and learning. At the same time, if it is to serve the goal of boosting productivity, professional and workplace learning needs to be based around and integrated with work. Yet most advances in learning technologies have been made within K-12 and higher education settings, and in the area of formal learning environments in general. Technologies developed within formal education settings are nevertheless also increasingly being appropriated for use with/by professional learners in contexts other than those for which they were originally designed.

This special issue on “Designing technologies to support professional and workplace learning for situated practice” aims to showcase the latest developments and innovations in, and advance the scientific discourse on issues specific to, designing technologies that support learning for work. In setting out to achieve this aim, we place focus on learning that is intended to improve work practice, and that is situated within work activities and contexts.

By situating learning within work, a close relationship is evoked between the workplace environment and professional learning-for example, there are strong connections between working and learning; individual learning and organizational learning; and between learning and knowledge creation. This brings with it challenges, such as those stemming from the fact that learning is focused on solving concrete problems, that finding time and a space for learning can be difficult, and that overall the ability to transfer learning across different work contexts is challenging albeit crucial to professional learning. Technologies that have been developed and/or appropriated for situated workplace learning include mobile and ubiquitous technologies, social and collaborative work tools, intelligent and adaptive tutoring and mentoring/coaching systems, augmented and mixed reality applications for on-the-job learner guidance, professional learning analytics, and many others. However, these!
  technologies only address some of the challenges of situated workplace learning. The sociotechnical systems of technology-enhanced professional learning, in which professional learners live, work, and learn, function differently to those of formal education, so technologies developed for K-12 and higher education are often not easily applied to work-integrated learning.

To address this crucial gap, we aim to trigger discussion around the state of the art and future imaginaries, in terms of novel technologies that support professional learning and how these can be designed, implemented, and used in order to open up opportunities for professionals (e.g., accelerating learning by enabling learning just in time and collaboratively in new ways) while mitigating risks that have been the focus of debate in the media as well as the academic literature (e.g., datafication, data ownership, algorithms with built-in biases, assumptions behind the design of these algorithms).

This is a call for papers that contribute to research and research-informed practice in technology-enhanced, professional learning by:

a) identifying characteristics of professional learning that are due to the social context in which professional learning is embedded and that are relevant for technology design;

b) interrogating technology practices specific to these characteristics of professional learning, and using the results to inform design-examples are issues of setting aside time and space for learning, privacy issues or issues related to existing power hierarchies, and the potential non-sharedness of learning as a goal of organizational relevance, to name a few;

c) evidencing the ways in which emerging, novel technologies might improve professional learning in a variety of work contexts. Such papers could both be based on experimental studies on emerging, novel technologies that consider salient aspects of professional learning in the experiment design as well as based on field studies investigating the design, development, and application of the technologies in professional learning settings. Special emphasis could be placed on reducing risks introduced by modern technologies, such as increased surveillance in the workplace.

More background on the rationale and motivations for this special issue, along with key references, can be found on the resource page for the special issue at https://ieee-edusociety.org/publications/tlt-workplace-learning-special-issue .

SUGGESTED TOPICS

Topics of interest for the special issue thus include, but are not limited to, the design and development of technological solutions and applications aimed at:

– remote or distributed work-based learning;
– workplace and professional learning that help ensure resilience to continuity crises (e.g., pandemics, natural disasters);
– supporting and assessing transfer of learning to, and between, on-the-job situations;
– learning-as-knowledge-creation in workplace and professional settings;
– learning in complex professional domains and/or in domains with low uptake of learning technologies;
– coaching and mentoring in the workplace (both human and intelligent agent-based);
– the development of “soft” skills in the workplace and professions;
– supporting the links between individual learning, organizational learning, and capability building;
– learning through reflection on workplace and professional practice, including collaborative or shared reflection;
– assessment and credentialing of workplace and professional learning;
– the modeling, development, and management of workplace and professional competencies (i.e., competency-based learning and assessment);
– computer-supported collaborative workplace and professional learning.

Also of interest are investigations of specific technologies as applied to workplace and professional learning, such as:

– adaptive and personalized learning systems, including learner models for enabling them;
– authoring and instructional design tools/platforms;
– games and gamification;
– modeling, simulation, and digital twin technologies and applications;
– reusable learning objects and learning designs;
– semantic Web services, applications, and ontologies;
– social networking and knowledge-sharing infrastructures;
– virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR), mixed reality (MR), and other extended reality (XR) technologies;
– wearable devices and interfaces;
– learning analytics and data mining technologies/applications.

Note: TLT is somewhat unique among educational technology journals in that it is both a computer science journal and an education journal. In order to be considered for publication in TLT, papers must make substantive technical and/or design-knowledge contributions to the development of learning technologies as well as show how the technologies can be used to support learning. Papers that are concerned primarily with evaluation of existing learning technologies and their applications are suitable for TLT only if the technologies themselves are novel, or if significant technical and/or design insights are offered.

KEY DATES

– Abstract submission (optional): April 15, 2021
– Feedback from guest editors to authors on abstract: April 22, 2021
– Full manuscripts due: June 15, 2021
– Completion of first review round: End of September 2021
– Revised manuscripts due: End of November 2021
– Final decision notification: End of January 2022
– Publication materials due: End of March 2022
– Publication of special issue: Summer 2022

SUBMISSION AND REVIEW PROCESS

Abstracts may be submitted to the guest editors via email at mailto:tlt-workplacelearning@ieee.org ; this is not mandatory, but will enable the editors to offer early feedback on the paper's suitability with respect to the aims and scope of the special issue.

Full manuscripts should be prepared in accordance with the IEEE Transactions on Learning Technologies guidelines ( https://ieee-edusociety.org/publications/tlt-author-resources ) and submitted via the journal's ScholarOne Manuscripts portal ( https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/tlt-cs ), being sure to select the relevant special issue name during the submission process. Manuscripts must not have been published or currently be under consideration for publication elsewhere. Only full manuscripts intended for review, not abstracts, should be submitted via the ScholarOne portal, and conversely, full manuscripts cannot be accepted via email.

Each full manuscript that passes an initial prescreening will be subjected to rigorous peer review in accordance with TLT's editorial policies and procedures. It is anticipated that 7 or 8 articles (plus a guest editorial) will ultimately be published in the special issue.