The COVID-19 crisis influenced universities worldwide in early 2020. In Austria, all universities were closed in March 2020 as a preventive measure, and meetings with over 100 people were banned and a curfew was imposed. This development also had a massive impact on teaching, which in Austria takes place largely face-to-face. In this paper we would like to describe the situation of an Austrian university regarding e-learning before and during the first three weeks of the changeover of the teaching system, using the example of Graz University of Technology (TU Graz). The authors provide insights into the internal procedures, processes and decisions of their university and present figures on the changed usage behaviour of their students and teachers. As a theoretical reference, the article uses the e-learning readiness assessment according to Alshaher (2013), which provides a framework for describing the status of the situation regarding e-learning before the crisis. The paper concludes with a description of enablers, barriers and bottlenecks from the perspective of the members of the Educational Technology department.

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Developing social innovation and entrepreneurship competences and skills of children and young people is on the agenda of European educational policy-makers. The European research and innovation project “DOIT – Entrepreneurial skills for young social innovators in an open digital world” suggests using makerspaces and tools, within schools and externally, to promote practice-based social innovation and entrepreneurial learning of children and young people. This article first gives an overview of different types of maker-spaces, addresses the concept of maker education, and highlights common development goals of such education with entrepreneurship education regarding particular attitudes and competences. The main part then describes the DOIT learning program that allows children and young people (6–16 years) to acquire skills and an entrepreneurial mind-set for turning creative ideas into potential social innovations. This program is currently trialed in DOIT pilots in different types of makerspaces in ten European countries. The article describes learning processes and outcomes that are promoted by the program with two examples that are different regarding the makerspaces, topics and other aspects. Some first experiences and lessons learned from these and other pilots are summarized.

This article theorizes the functional relationship between the human components (i.e., scholars) and non-human components (i.e., structural configurations) of academic domains. It is organized around the following question: in what ways have scholars formed and been formed by the structural configurations of their academic domain? The article uses as a case study the academic domain of education and technology to examine this question. Its authorship approach is innovative, with a worldwide collection of academics (99 authors) collaborating to address the proposed question based on their reflections on daily social and academic practices. This collaboration followed a three-round process of contributions via email. Analysis of these scholars’ reflective accounts was carried out, and a theoretical proposition was established from this analysis. The proposition is of a mutual (yet not necessarily balanced) power (and therefore political) relationship between the human and non-human constituents of an academic realm, with the two shaping one another. One implication of this proposition is that these non-human elements exist as political ‘actors’, just like their human counterparts, having ‘agency’ – which they exercise over humans. This turns academic domains into political (functional or dysfunctional) ‘battlefields’ wherein both humans and non-humans engage in political activities and actions that form the identity of the academic domain. For more information about the authorship approach, please see Al Lily AEA (2015) A crowd-authoring project on the scholarship of educational technology. Information Development. doi: 10.1177/0266666915622044.

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Although less well established than in other parts of the world, higher education institutions in German-speaking countries have seen a marked increase in the number of open educational resource (OER) initiatives and in government-supported OER funding in recent years. OER implementation, however, brings with it a unique set of challenges in German-speaking higher education contexts, stemming in part from copyright laws and use permissions that have made sharing and reuse of educational materials less prevalent. The article discusses how instructional development centers, including university didactics centers (hochschuldidaktische Zentren) and e-learning centers, can play a key role in faculty uptake and adoption of OER, and concludes by proposing a set of OER implementation guidelines that leverage the expertise and interfacing role of these centers in German-speaking countries.

This study aims to develop the Gramabot application as a means of online learning during the pandemic and to examine its effectiveness as a medium for German grammar learning. The design-based research uses learning experience design methodology. Beside an introduction of the state of the art of chatbots for language learning, the paper describes the concept of the chatbot application and its evaluation. Prior experiences with chatbots, implementation experiences and evaluations insights were obtained from 36 Indonesian students with beginner level German language skills. The data were described using qualitative and simple descriptive statistical analysis. The results of the analysis show that most of the respondents are familiar with several chatbot applications, the use of chatbots is not as a learning medium, but as a means of asking questions about products. In addition, String Matching is a suitable method used to develop Gramabot. Based on the results of the evaluation, it can be concluded that Gramabot can help students understand basic level grammatical material.