Special Issues
Initiatives
Best of EDEN 2010 (Click here to see the articles)
One of the important missions of EDEN is to support the exchange of academic and professional experience, to promote navigation and information reach on the rapidly evolving scene.
EDEN is organising since 1992 annual European conferences for open, distance and e-learning, and also bi-annual thematic research workshops and Open Classroom conferences on learning innovation for school level e-learning.
The EDEN conferences have become major academic and professional events in Europe, with increasing attendance from other continents. They are based on collecting best practice: the papers build presented and published in the Proceedings have been serving as relevant resources for the professional community.
The integrating approach of the conferences helps to consolidate the academic and professional knowledge and to build the international community of professionals.
Research in open, distance and e-learning is indispensable to provide information for development, decision-making and quality of products and services. Even more this is the case as many changes occur and the pace as well as the extent of innovation often seem to be dramatically fast and wide.
A selection of the best EDEN conference papers from the past few years, revisiting research, innovation, and professional practice in distance and eLearning has been published under the title: "Distance and eLearning in Transition – Learning Innovation, Technology and Social Challenges" (ISTE and Wiley). The book is revisiting research, innovation, and professional practice in distance and eLearning.
It has been an ambition to introduce the regular publication of outstanding papers presented at the EDEN Conferences. Key elements of the framework for such compilation can naturally be EURODL and the Best Research Paper Awards Scheme.
The EDEN Best Research Paper Award was launched in 2008. and it is granted at EDEN’s Annual Conferences as well as at the Research Workshops. A high quality standard selection process guarantees the branding of the award for scholarly conference papers in the field of open, distance and e-learning.
The selection process takes place in collaboration with the Ulrich Bernath Foundation for Research in Open and Distance Learning and is supported by a Jury, nominated by the Foundation and approved by the EDEN Executive Committee.
A special issue of the European Journal of Open, Distance and E-learning - EURODL entitled "Best of EDEN 2010" has collected the enhanced versions of the final candidate and winner research papers of the Best Research Paper Awards 2010 (EDEN 2010 Annual Conference in Valencia in June and the 6th Research Workshop in Budapest)
EDEN is working on publishing the Special issue as printed version as well, later in 2011.
Dr Andras Szucs
Secretary General, EDEN