Written by Ana-Paula Correia, March 12, 2024
In March 2024, the Center on Education and Training for Employment (CETE) Director and Professor of Learning Technologies Ana-Paula Correia and Associate Directors Traci Lepicki and Melissa Ross presented at the Seventeenth International Conference on e-Learning & Innovative Pedagogies in Valencia, Spain.
The presentation titled “Research Center’s Ubiquitous Initiatives Empowering Adult Learners in the United States” was delivered on March 7, 2024, to an engaged audience at the Universitat Politècnica de València (Polytechnic University of Valencia). This year, the conference focused on People, Education, and Technology for a Sustainable Future, and the CETE leadership presentation was part of a themed session on Transformative Learning for Sustainable Futures.
Abstract
This innovation showcase discusses the latest initiatives of the Center on Education and Training for Employment (CETE), a translational research center located in the United States. These initiatives, in the realm of ubiquitous learning, have impacted mostly adult learners and advanced their professional development, fostering economic prosperity and cultivating healthy communities. We explore CETE’s role as a catalyst for social transformation, emphasizing its integration of learning technologies in designing sustainable futures. A future where learners can pursue different professional learning paths that lead to well-paid jobs in the digital economy. Key initiatives include the migration of a comprehensive five-day workshop on job analysis into a virtual and online educational event; an award-winning self-paced online training collection on how to effectively teach online; a hybrid curriculum to develop organizational social justice practices; and, more recently, an intentional effort to grow internal capacity on the utilization of generative artificial intelligence tools. Such initiatives exemplify CETE’s commitment to translating research into evidence-based practices in a series of efforts to leverage e-learning tools and innovative pedagogies to bridge educational gaps, provide just-in-time technical training, promote lifelong learning, and facilitate the design of socially transformative frameworks.
The Seventeenth International Conference on e-Learning & Innovative Pedagogies called for research addressing the following themes:
- Theme 1: Considering Digital Pedagogies
- Theme 2: New Digital Institutions and Spaces
- Theme 3: Technologies of Mediation
- Theme 4: Designing Social Transformations
Panels, special sessions, and presentations at the conference attended to the following lines of investigation:
- On the dynamics of learning in and through digital technologies.
- On the changing the institutional forms of education—classroom, schools, and learning communities—in the context of ubiquitous computing.
- On new learning devices and software tools.
- On the social transformations of technologies, and their implications for learning.
The conference was organized by the Common Ground Research Networks an organization that has been developing knowledge ecologies and researching scholarly communication technologies since 1984. They use CGScholar as a platform that seeks to become a trusted marketplace for knowledge work, including organizing conferences and acting as a publisher.