HLRC is an open-access journal with an international focus published by Walden University. It is indexed in Scopus and is listed in other indexes and abstracting services. Its aim is to disseminate both high-quality research and teaching best practices in tertiary education across cultures and disciplines. HLRC connects the ways research and best practice contribute to the public good and impact the communities that educators serve. ISSN 2157-6254 (Online)Higher Learning Research Communications.

ANNOUNCEMENT

CALL FOR PAPERS

Education Technologies and COVID-19: Experiences and Lessons Learned

The Higher Learning Research Communications journal (HLRC) is launching a call for papers for a special issue to be published in 2022. As a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, higher education institutions were required to pivot from primarily online instruction to hybrid and/or completely online instruction. This required significant investments in technologies that would allow faculty and administrators to make the pivot. We are interested in understanding the experiences of that shift, specifically as it relates to how educational technologies were used. Through empirical research and essays, we would like to collect a series of papers that describes the global response to technology needs and how the shifts impacted teaching and learning. Some questions of interest include but are not limited to:

• Technology considerations by universities as they pivoted to online instruction

• How countries are using educational technology, including learning management systems, handheld devices, webcasting, and other means of bringing faculty and students together) to achieve teaching and learning goals

• Specific tools used in the pivot, experiences with those tools, and outcomes assessment demonstrating the effectiveness (or lack of effectiveness) of tools

• How institutions dealt with Internet connectivity issues and how connectivity (or lack of) impacted instructional effectiveness

• The impact on teaching and learning of inequalities in access to the internet (“the digital divide”)

• Strategies used by instructors to achieve learning communities in the online classrooms

• How the pivot has driven changes to core teaching and learning models

• Student and faculty responses to the transition post-pandemic and how attitudes toward various technologies will shape future teaching and learning

• How institutions managed issues associated with giving assessments in online hybrid environments

Manuscripts can be submitted by March 31, 2022 to the journal website at https://scholarworks.waldenu.edu/hlrc/. Please indicate “Special Issue 2022” as part of the title to help us identify papers submitted for this purpose. We encourage papers from higher education institutions globally as well as those from new authors.