Proceedings of the 11th European Confernece on eLearning : ECEL 2012

These Proceedings represent the work of contributors to the 11th European Conference on e-learning, ECEL 2012, hosted this year by the University of Groningen, The Netherlands. The Conference Chair is Prof. Cees Smit Sibinga, and the Programme Chair is Dr Hans Beldhuis.

The conference will be opened with a keynote address by Prof. Eric Mazur from Harvard University, on the topic of Confessions of a Converted Lecturer. Also on the first day we have a presentation from Dan Peters of Blackboard, Eu-rope. We would especially like to thank BlackBoard for their support of the conference this year. The second day will be opened by Prof. dr. Fred Mulder, UNESCO Chair in Open Educational Resources at Open Universiteit, The Nether-lands, and later that day we have Prof. Johannes Cronjé from Cape Peninsula University of Technology in South Africa.

As usual the papers cover a wide spectrum of issues, all of which are pertinent to the successful use of e-learning. The papers represent current thinking on e-learning issues and within the five conference themes, contributions cover:

• Open educational resources (OER) and use of online materials and learning analytics

• (social) media use in e-learning with a special focus on mobile learning

• electronic assessment, with a special focus on automated assessment

• didactics and e-learning, following Eric Mazur’s work going deeper into the topic of peer-instruction

• Other conference highlights cover literacy skills and the changing role of teachers

It is clear that the role being played by e-learning in the pedagogical process is considerable and that there is still ample scope for further development. For this conference, the focus is on looking beyond the gadgets and the broad spectrum of papers demonstrates when, where and how e-learning is selected for its true value.

The ECEL Conference constitutes a valuable platform for individuals to present their research findings, display their work in progress and discuss conceptual advances in many different branches of e-learning. At the same time, it pro-vides an important opportunity for members of the community to come together with peers, share knowledge and exchange ideas.

With an initial submission of 165 abstracts, after the double blind, peer review process there are 59 academic papers, 1 Phd Paper and 12 Work in Progress papers in these Conference Proceedings. These papers reflect the truly global nature of research in the area with contributions from Austria, Canada, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Germany, Greece, India, Iran, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Jordan, Lithuania, Malaysia, New Zealand, Northern Ireland, Portugal, Romania, Slovakia, South Africa, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Taiwan, The Netherlands, United Kingdom and the United States.

A selection of papers – those agreed by a panel of reviewers and the editor, will be published in a special conference edition of the EJEL (Electronic Journal of e-Learning, www.ejel.org).

I wish you a most interesting conference.

Dr. Hans Beldhuis

University of Groningen, The Netherlands

Programme Chair

October 2012