Prof. Niki Davis
Distinguished Professor of e-Learning, School of Educational Studies and Leadership
Director of the College of Education e-Learning Lab
University of Canterbury

Prof. Niki Davis is Distinguished Professor of e-Learning in the University of Canterbury, New Zealand. She is recognized internationally as a leading expert in ICT in teacher education. Sought by UNESCO, international agencies, and institutions for her expertise; she has over 200 publications and is Editor in Chief of the Journal of Open Flexible and Distance Learning (JOFDL). Prestigious awards include an European Commission Marie Curie Fellowship with Trinity College, Ireland; Oxford Internet Institute and Canterbury Fellowships, the international Society of Information Technology in Teacher Education (SITE) award for Outstanding Service to Digital Equity. Collaborative work includes culturally sensitive e-learning with success for indigenous peoples. Prof. Davis is currently working on a book and associated postgraduate course on change with digital technologies in education and training.

Keynote address

Now that learning can occur anywhere anytime, educational leaders face new challenges to engage learners in quality assured outcomes. Niki Davis’ Arena of Change with Digital Technologies in Education and Training recognises multi-layered systems in which both educational practices and digital technologies evolve separately and together, both locally and globally. Prof. Davis will illustrate her Arena framework with leading edge research, which includes MOOC and mobile augmented reality. Applied in this way Davis’ Arena will provide guidance to leaders of change with digital technologies in education including university teachers, their leaders and learners. Her critique calls for designers to aim for equity alongside ubiquity and for leaders to support that quest.

Prof. Rory McGreal
UNESCO / Commonwealth of Learning / International Council for Open and Distance Education
   Chair in OER
Professor, Centre for Distance Education
Athabasca University

Prof. Rory McGreal is the Chairholder in Open Educational Resources (OER) of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), Commonwealth of Learning (COL) and International Council for Open and Distance Education. He is a Professor in the Centre for Distance Education at Athabasca University (Canada’s Open University based in Alberta, Canada), and the Director of the Technology Enhanced Knowledge Research Institute. Formerly, he was the Associate Vice President, Research. Previously, he was the executive director of TeleEducation New Brunswick, a province-wide bilingual (French/English) distributed distance learning network. Before that, he was responsible for the expansion of Contact North (a distance education network in Northern Ontario) into the high schools of the region. His Ph.D. degree (1999) in Computer Technology in Education at Nova Southeastern University’s School for Computer and Information Science was taken at a distance using the Internet.

Keynote address

The free sharing of open educational resources (OER) can be seen as essential for promoting the creation of content usable in mobile learning. OER on mobile devices can be effective in reducing the knowledge divide that separates and partitions societies. Educators worldwide continue to face significant challenges related to providing increased access to high quality learning, while containing or reducing costs. New developments in information technology, especially with tablets, phablets and other mobile devices, highlight the shortcomings and challenges for the traditional education community, as well as those of more flexible providers, such as open universities. Such developments have the potential to increase access and flexibility in education by rendering it ubiquitous.

When using commercial content, Digital Rights Management (DRM) imposes technological restrictions on both students and instructors, including limitations on editing, reusing, and making effective use of the content on different devices. These restrictions are supported by comprehensive click-on licences that limit the use of the content and provide onerous legal penalties on students and instructors who make use of the content in way prohibited by the licence. As a result, education for all using the new devices continues to be a goal that challenges — and will continue to challenge educators. The increased use of Open Educational Resources, when combined with mobile learning, can be used to overcome many of the obstacles faced by both learners and educators.

Prof. Xiaoqing Gu
Head of Department of Educational Information Technology
East China Normal University

Prof. Xiaoqing Gu is the Head of the Department of Educational Information Technology, East China Normal University. She teaches courses on instructional design for ICT-supported learning, ICT-integrated pedagogy and Introduction to Research on e-learning. Her research has focused primarily on ICT in education, including learning design, ICT-supported content design and development, ICT-integrated pedagogical innovation, computer-supported collaborative learning, and learning analytics to inform pedagogical design. She has been involved in plenty of funded research projects as the principal investigator or a co-investigator. The most relevant projects have been “Innovative design for learning with a mobile device: resources, services and best cases”, supported by the Ministry of Education, and “Research on mobile learning resources development for lifelong learning”, supported by the National Social Science Foundation. She is the Editor-in-Chief of International Journal of Smart Technology and Learning and an Associate Editor of Journal of Education and Learning.

Keynote address

This talk introduces the trajectory of the studies by the speaker’s team on mobile and ubiquitous learning during the past years. The studies have focused firstly on the informal learning settings, and then moved to the formal settings of K–12 and colleges. At first, this talk will examine the design of mobile learning for adult learners to explore how their informal learning was supported when mobile technologies were new and were considered a distraction from formal learning. It will discuss examples of mobile learning projects dedicated to lifelong learning in informal settings. Second, this talk will introduce my team’s recent in-depth case studies on analyzing the strategies of mobile and ubiquitous learning. Such learning is becoming more formal, although it takes place in informal settings. In addition, with lessons from the experience of mobile and ubiquitous learning in informal settings, our current studies are oriented towards that in formal settings. The last part of this talk will introduce studies on the design of using mobile and ubiquitous technologies and strategies in K-12 and higher education settings, and will highlight issues on the support of the mobile and ubiquitous technologies.

Prof. Agnes Kukulska-Hulme
Professor of Learning Technology and Communication
Institute of Educational Technology
The Open University

Prof. Agnes Kukulska-Hulme is Professor of Learning Technology and Communication in the Institute of Educational Technology at The Open University, UK. She has held academic positions in the fields of language teaching, computational linguistics and educational technology. Since 2001 her focus has been on mobile learning research and innovative practice. She is Past-President of the International Association for Mobile Learning and serves on the editorial boards of several journals including the International Journal of Mobile and Blended Learning, System, RPTEL, and ReCALL (the research journal of the European Association for Computer-Assisted Language Learning). She has co-edited two books on mobile learning and a third one will be published later this year. Agnes has led research on various UK and European Union projects including MOTILL (Mobile Technologies in Lifelong Learning), the MASELTOV project on smart and personalized technologies for social inclusion, the British Council funded Mobile Pedagogy for English Language Teaching, and the SALSA project on immigrant language learning in the next generation of smart cities. Prof. Kukulska-Hulme also contributes to The Open University’s Masters programme in Online and Distance Education and strategic visioning around new learning systems and online tuition.

Keynote address

Classrooms create useful yet also troublesome boundaries for language teaching and learning which needs to develop in many other settings. Drawing on recent mobile learning research projects in The Open University’s Institute of Educational Technology, this talk will consider the opportunities and challenges of technology-supported learning that may take place in a range of locations such as homes, places of work, means of transportation, and various locations in and around the city. We have focused on adult learners particularly immigrants and international students, but the experiences have wider relevance. Mobile and social technologies can offer support for informal learning that enables extended and varied practice in more authentic and learner-centric settings. In the European project MASELTOV, a prototype app comprising a suite of tools and services was developed as a ‘mobile assistant’ on smartphones for immigrants recently arrived in Europe. This integrated mobile app includes augmented reality navigation, language lessons, a camera-based translation tool, a game to raise awareness of cultural differences and support for social interaction. The development was underpinned by an incidental learning framework that focuses on making virtue out of unplanned ‘incidents’ in the city as well as planning for more predictable situated and location-based learning. The research has been fertile ground for thinking about the notion of ‘assistance’ and has highlighted peer learning and the importance of community. Implications include how language teaching and learning needs to adapt to help learners assist others in the host community or target language, as well as being recipients of assistance.