JCHE special issue on advancing research on open education

Special issue focus
Open Education is currently at the crossroads of becoming either an integral part of the higher education landscape or a sellout for venture-capital driven companies who use openness as a means to increase their customer base. At the same time research on open education is developing into two different directions, namely open educational resources (OER) and open educational practices (OEP). For both directions, an underlying vision is formulated to increase accessibility to (higher) education on a global scale. While OER research has focused for a long time on production and publication of learning resources under open licenses, little attention has been given to actual research about adaptation and embedding of OER in new contexts including psycho-social factors influencing OER reuse. For MOOCs and open courses, the most prominent research challenges are related to scalability of feedback and support, educational design of open courses, and also on the integration of new technologies into open learning environments. These challenges also lead to many unresolved questions about interfaces between formal and informal learning, certification and recognition, and also the wider societal responsibilities for higher education.

This special issue titled “Advancing Research on Open Education” will focus on empirical research dealing with the advancement of the field of open education for postsecondary and adult learners. Papers should be theory-driven and results should be reported based on data and evidence. Conceptual papers contributing an integrated approach to open education are invited as well as systematic literature reviews related to the field.

Topics of interest
Evaluation of MOOCs and OER implementations

• Measuring learning success
• Motivational aspects
• Affective aspects
• Drop-out rates
• Legitimate peripheral participation
• Quality indicators

Learning Design and Conceptual Issues

• Cross-cultural MOOCs
• Cross-disciplinary MOOCs
• Recommender systems
• Community building
• Adaptation, Personalization
• Creating content for MOOCs
• Video development for MOOCs
• Observation of the learning process: reflexivity, traces semantics, sharing and reusing learning experience between peers and with tutors
• Scalability of MOOC design

Learning Analytics

• Dashboards for self-regulated learning
• Use of open badges for certification
• Formative assessment
• Educational data mining
• Process mining

Technological Aspects

• New approaches for MOOC platforms
• Development of appropriate information systems
• Usability / HCI for MOOC platforms
• Mobile technology for MOOCs
• Advanced approaches for OER repositories

Organizational aspects

• MOOCs as internal innovation
• Support mechanisms for Open Education
• Open Education strategies

Time planning:
Submission deadline: 1 May 2016 16 15 May 2016
Review results: 1 June 2016 15 June 2016
Revised paper submission: 15 July 2016 1 August 2016
Special issue published: December 2016

About the Journal of Computing in Higher Education
The Journal of Computing in Higher Education (JCHE) contributes to our understanding of the design, development, and implementation of instructional processes and technologies in higher education. JCHE publishes original research, literature reviews, implementation and evaluation studies, and theoretical, conceptual, and policy papers that provide perspectives on instructional technology’s role in improving access, affordability, and outcomes of postsecondary education. Priority is given to well-documented original papers that demonstrate a strong grounding in learning theory and/or rigorous educational research design. In 2014 the journal had an ISI impact factor of 0.909.

Review Board (tbc)
•  Carlos Delgado Kloos (UC3M, Spain)
•  Yishay Moor (PAU Education, Spain)
•  Jeroen Janssen (Utrecht University, Netherlands)
•  Justin Reich (MIT, USA)
•  Jonatan Castano-Munoz (IPTS, Spain)
•  Davinia Hernandez-Leo (Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Spain)
•  Mar Perez-Sanaugustin, (Pontifical Catholical University of Chile, Chile)
•  Collin Milligan (Glasgow Caledonian University, UK)
•  Tharindu Liyanagunawardena (University College of Estate Management, UK)
•  Doug Clow (Open University, UK)
•  Peter van Rosmalen (Open University, Netherlands)
•  Sandra Schön (Salzburg Research, Austria)
•  Anja Lorenz (TU Chemnitz, Germany)
•  Anouschka van Leeuwen (Utrecht University, Netherlands)
•  Karel Kreijns (Open University, Netherlands)
•  Mohamed Chatti (RWTH Aachen University, Germany)
•  Timothy Hew Khe Foon (University of Hong Kong, China)
•  Ulrike Cress (Leibniz-Institute for Knowledge Media, Germany)
•  Mark Brown (Dublin City University, Ireland)
•  Mark Lee (Charles Sturt University, Australia)

Submission Instructions and template

Manuscripts should be submitted to the journal’s online manuscript-submission and peer-review system: www.edmgr.com/jche and authors should select the “S.I. Open Education” code for their article type. Inquiries should be sent to guest editors (see below). The style of the manuscript should conform to APA style and manuscripts should be approximately 5000 words in length. In general, the journal follows the recommendations of the 2009 Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association (6th ed.), and it is suggested that contributors refer to this publication when preparing the manuscript.

Guest editors

Prof. Dr. Marco Kalz, Chair for Open Education, Open University of the Netherlands, marco.kalz@ou.nl
Univ. Doz. Dr. Martin Ebner, Head Educational Technology, Technical University Graz, martin.ebner@tugraz.at
Mohammad Khalil, Educational Technology, Technical University Graz, mohammad.khalil@tugraz.at

A PDF-version of the call is available here.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.