THEMES

The COVID-19 pandemic is a key theme for plenary sessions at WLS 2021 and also a potential theme for submissions of papers, panels and workshops. The past year has challenged students, educators and managers alike. These challenges have some common features, independent of place in the world. Some challenges are more particular,  also offering means of comparison. Despite vaccination and reflecting globally uneven access to vaccination, one long-term scenario will be reduced travel and thereby student and teacher mobility. New approaches to combining&blending online and offline learning will likely emerge.

As the WLS team is putting up plenary panels om the theme, we particularly invite papers and flyers/posters. Please confer the template and potential sub themes below. Generally, please also suggest other main themes and sub themes.

– COVID-19 — disruptive change
– Students’ well being
– Education transformation
– Teachers’ challenges
– Campus communication
– Coping with exceptions
– North/South challenges posted by COVID-19

World Learning Summit always keep a section on Entreprenurship in learning and education, reflecting challenges society-wide of new media, media ubiquity and digital transformation. We collaborate with Nordic EdTech Industries, seeking to provide an exhibit space for new learning platforms, learning games and other aspects of entrepreneurship and innovation in education and learning. Over the years we have had about 40 of these companies on stage at our summits.

Among themes we invite submissions on, but not limited to, please find:

– New virtual learning spaces
– 3D immersive learning environments
– Digital storytelling
– MOOCs
– Learning platforms
– Digital didactics
– Digital learning innovations
– Situated learning
– Problem-based learning

Pedagogy as a research discipline and professional practice, is confronted with new issues and challenges stemming from media developments and resulting processes of globalization and new network-building. How is the role of teaching affected by new technologies_ Do studens learn more, better, differently? How does the classroome xperience change?

We invite submissions on, but not limited to, the following themes:

– Multimodality
– Multimedia
– Pedagogy int the context of digital transformation
– Best practice in digital pedagogy
– Quality in education
– MOOCs, in the context of pedagogy
– Interdisciplinary challenges
– Challenges in life–long learning

Like educational institutions at other levels, higher education is challenged on a number of different levels, based on COVID-19 but also far beyond it. Society’s digital transformation is ushering in a whole new set of institutional challenges, as well as practical, organizational challenges and challenges of collaborating across traditional scholarly fields and disciplines. Accordingly, WLS 2021 invites submissions on the following sub-themes, but not limited to these:

– Communication to – and with – students
– Student involvement in institutional change
– Leadership in Higher Education
– Education politics in an era of digital transformation
– International standardization
– Access to education
– Education and inclusion
– Blockchain – visions and realities
– Higher Education in a globalized world
– Architecture and design: Re-imagining learning spaces
– Facilitating cross-disciplinary cultivation

It is a mistake of isolate “future learning” to pedagogy and education, in a narrow sense. Challenges facing Higher Education are society-wide, and society is now global. Beginning already with the advent of satellite communication during WW2, “Learning Society” has been on a path towards globalization, representing deep challenges to our ways of organizing education and learning. Since about 1990, society’s digital transformation has rendered legacy ‘cultural fields’ in need of fundamental realignment: The music industry, the film industry, journalism and information flows. TV and entertainment, universities and publishing houses: The story is the same. How we envisage societal change in the wake of changes in the media sector has profound impacts on how we understand the current challenges in Higher Education.

Among the themes we invite, but not limited to them, please find:

– Education and learning in a McLuhan perspective
– Future Learning in a digitalized world
– Theorizing entrepreneurship and innovation
– Philosophies of social change, Education 2.0
– North South challenges and perspectives
– Sustainable education for a sustainable world
– UN’s Sustainable development Goals
– State and private education funding
– Global standardization of education and learning
– Education – the last frontier against extremism?
– Education’s role in fostering democracy

We as individuals and we as societies are in a process of constant learning, adaption, and acclimatizing to new conditions. In the fast few decades we have seen profound changes in our learning eco systems. ‘New social media’ arguably represents a profound alteration in terms of how we pursue and make use of knowledge and information flows. So how do envisage ‘future learning society’?

Among the themes we suggest, but not limited to these , please review:

– Futures forecasting
– Open Society
– Open Collaboration
– Open Innovation
– Learning, democracy and the ideals of Enlightenment
– Culture as learning
– Facilitating global exchange and mobility
– Students in a global world
– Combating extremism and ‘fake news’
– A rational learning society
– Global fairness
– The political economy of global education

As we progressed through the COVID–19 pandemic, concerns with students’ well-being became steadily more apparent. How do we listen to student voices? What mechanisms do we have for embedding students’ concerns in planning for future sustainable education? What do we know? What have studies on the matter shown in 2020/2021? How do we chart a future of Higher Education taking into account the deep changes that are now coming to the forefront in terms of future travel, future student mobility and ways of re-imagining the campus experience?

Among the themes we suggest, but not limited to:

– The student campus experience
– Student involvement in planning education’s digital future
– Policies for a better student experience
– Marginalization and inclusion
– Capacity–building: Uses of digital learning environments

Higher Education institutions were developed in a different time, when society was ordered differently. Higher Education Institutions have been challenged increasingly to better reflect contemporary knowledge needs, a more flexible mode of delivering courses and programs. As institutions, we reflect not only histories, but imaginations of what Higher Education is, ought to be and might be in the future.

Accordingly, we pose a set of potential themes, but not limited to these:

– Adapting to life-long learning
– MOOCs in the eco system of learning
– Interactions with society in shaping higher edcuation
– Policies of higher education’s adapting to society  challenges
– Best practises in life-long learning
– Post-graduate lerning
– Knowledge needs in the work force
– 4th Industrial Revolution – thinking ahead