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Although gamification and the use of serious games in education are usually recommended, according to the literature in the field it seems these approaches are hardly used in teacher training contexts. This might depend on the fact that the use of strategies such as Points, Leaderboards and Badges, do not fit well with a context where collaboration and practice sharing need to be encouraged, rather than hindered by competitive mechanics. In this sense, narrative approaches seem to fit better with these contexts. In this paper we propose a gamification approach for Teacher Professional Development based on a narrative approach. Thanks to an exploratory study, we have tested the proposed approach and collected preliminary data that are presented. The main results are encouraging, as teachers’ reactions were positive in respect to the usefulness and effectiveness of the proposed approach and also in respect to their willingness to apply similar gamification strategies in their practice.

This study compares two versions (one digital, one hybrid) of a serious board game for teacher training called the “4Ts game”. Teachers play the game in groups to learn about—and directly engage in—the joint design of collaborative learning activities for their students by choosing the Tasks to be proposed, the Timing of activities, the Technologies to be used, and the Team composition, in an iterative process of decision making. The game comes in three versions: fully tangible, digital, and hybrid. This paper focuses on the interaction design of the digital and hybrid versions. In both cases, teachers pick cards up from four decks, read the prompts provided in the cards, and place them on a board to design a learning activity together. Their decision-making process is scaffolded by the digital or hybrid game versions, which provide feedback and suggestions and guide teachers toward the creation of a coherent design. The user experience is quite different in the two formats. In the hybrid game, teachers physically manipulate tangible cards on a tabletop board, and the board status is replicated on a laptop application that displays automatic feedback and guidance. By contrast, the digital version is played using an Interactive Whiteboard with touch-screen capabilities, thereby allowing teachers to manipulate digital cards on a digital board. The game was used in the context of two training initiatives targeting in-service school teachers (N = 42). Data were collected on acceptance of the model upon which the game is built, acceptance of the game itself, overall user satisfaction, and knowledge gains. Results show that teachers generally liked both versions of the game, especially the opportunity provided for receiving guidance in the design process. Additionally, teachers’ knowledge about learning design and collaborative learning increased significantly between the pre- and post-test for both the digital and the hybrid game groups. However, few significant differences were found between the groups that used the digital and hybrid versions of the game: the digital version was perceived as being slightly easier to use (p < 0.001). Overall, the study suggests that both versions of the game have the potential for teacher training, while the user interface of the hybrid version should be further refined to fully harness the game’s potential.

This explorative case study investigates a game-based approach to the professional development of in-service teachers in Self-Regulated Learning. The impact of this approach was assessed in terms of acceptance of the game, knowledge gain and changes in teachers’ beliefs concerning the importance of nine design principles that can be adopted to foster the development of students’ SRL skills. Our findings suggest that the game-based approach adopted in this study was well-accepted, with Wilcoxon tests revealing that the mean rating is significantly different from the median point of the scale for all items measured after game use. As for teachers’ learning gains and changes in beliefs, a questionnaire submitted to participants before and after the gameplay showed significant changes in knowledge and a more varied but generally positive trend in terms of changes in beliefs. Thus, the study’s findings advocate for increased dedication to researching and experimenting with the incorporation of games in teacher professional development, potentially extending these efforts to other educational domains.

Davide Taibi, senior researcher at the Institute for Educational Technology (CNR), has joined the editorial team as co-editor of the Italian Journal of Educational Technology

Writing the editorial of a general issue is usually harder than writing that of a special issue. In fact, the connection between the papers risks to be rather loose, with the only common denominator being the journal scope. This time, however, I was lucky, as four out of the six papers that were accepted for this general issue seem to be connected by a common thread: teachers, their professional identity, and their relationship with technology. I believe there are good reasons for this. More than ever, the crucial role of educators’ competence has come to the forefront, with particular focus on digital competence, including the ability to use technology in an effective way in educational settings, be them face-to-face, hybrid or online. The main reason for this increased awareness has been under our eyes since the COVID-19 pandemic and the consequent distancing measures have forced educators around the world to use technology to “surrogate” face-to-face teaching. Unfortunately, in most cases, the verb “surrogate” turns out to be the correct one: too often technological environments have been used merely as a (sub-optimal) substitute of the usual physical environment, due to the lack of time and competence needed to redesign teaching from scratch, taking advantage of the full potential of technology. In addition, other important challenges are playing the role of a litmus test for teachers’ need for continuous professional development. One of all is the need to ensure that all learners can develop their potential in a context where students’ cultural diversity is increasing and, at the same time, nationalist sentiments and lack of tolerance continue to fester among the population. Our only chance to build the bases for a peaceful world is through so-called global education, and this makes teachers’ competence in inclusive education and informed use of technology of paramount importance. However, luckily, some institutions have been working in this direction even before the pandemic [...]

This study is one of the first investigations conducted within the Italian school system to capture teachers’ perspective, experiences and perceptions about the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on school education. It was performed two months after the beginning of lockdown, when online teaching and learning processes were fully in place and had reached a steady state. The paper reports a descriptive analysis together with a network analysis, and the search for causal relationships among the variables that have been investigated. Generally, respondents reported that the reactions of educational institutions and individual teachers were satisfactory, preventing the collapse of the education system in spite of loss of contact with 6-10% of the student population and a significant teacher workload increase that posed individual time management challenges. Although teachers tended to adopt teaching strategies that reproduced standard classroom dynamics, the possibility of operating in this comfort zone generated a positive feeling about using technologies, a perception of increased digital skills mastery and a change in mindset about educational processes. In turn, this led to an increase in the perceived sustainability of online education, with about a third of the teachers expressing the wish to adopt a blended configuration for future teaching activities. Almost all participants recognized the significance of a digital pedagogy and the need to include it in the training curricula to prepare future teachers.

The 4Cs framework, concerning self-regulated professional learning in knowledge intensive domains, is the lens through which participatory practices in learning design are investigated in this paper. The framework identifies four types of participatory behaviours: Consuming, Creating, Connecting and Contributing. A survey involving 117 Italian practicing teachers reveals that they regard all the 4Cs as important, but self-reported behaviours do not align with such beliefs. This misalignment is most significant for Connecting and Contributing behaviours (herein called altruistic behaviours). As for Consuming and Creating (individualistic behaviours), the former is rather scant while the latter is the most practiced, despite a wealth of research addressing the need to make Learning Designs reusable. Besides, the majority of the interviewees do not know the most well-known learning design tools produced by academic research. These data reveal limited impact of learning design research and indicate the way ahead for promoting teachers’ participatory practices.

This study, focused on collaborative learning approaches, aims to contribute to our understanding of whether and how teachers propose these kinds of activities in their daily practice. Particularly, this study aims to explore teachers’ behaviour when designing such activities for their learners with respect to different learning settings (i.e., face-to-face and/or blended settings vs. fully online settings). With reference to fully online settings, the Emergency Remote Teaching that took place during the COVID-19 outbreak is used as a reference case. The results of a self-reported survey of Italian teachers (N = 268) are presented. Our conclusions indicate that Italian teachers do propose collaborative learning activities to some extent in face-to-face and/or blended settings as well as in fully online settings, with statistically significant differences both in reference to the approaches adopted and to the (technological) tools used. Nonetheless, the data also indicate that teachers’ design decisions are not always in line with recommendations widely proposed by the collaborative learning research community.

As is almost impossible to ignore, in Spring 2020 the COVID-19 pandemic forced many educational institutions around the globe to suspend face-to-face classes and hastily replace them with online activities. Although disruption of educational provision is not a new phenomenon, this has been the largest in history, affecting 94% of the world's student population (Crompton, Burke, Jordan, & Wilson, 2021). The shift from face-to-face to online teaching, however, was not the culmination of a well-considered instructional design process inspired by the affordances of online education and rooted in a thorough needs analysis. Rather, it was an expediency mandated by a public health emergency whose spread was unexpected, exceptionally fast and poorly understood. The pressing haste with which many educational institutions moved to online education meant that they were not ready to harness the strengths of online learning nor deal with its limitations. In the new circumstances created by the pandemic, it was immediately clear that online learning was simply a quick fix adopted in “less-than-ideal circumstances” (Hodges, Moore, Lockee, Trust, & Bond, 2020). In spite of the high hopes of getting quickly back to normal, schools’ and universities’ online activities lasted, in many forms and in many countries, much longer than initially expected. Physical distancing was adopted in many countries as the main strategy to counter the spread of a pandemic that was not showing any signs of relenting (Bozkurt et al., 2020). In many cases, online or hybrid teaching was seen, even during the 2020/2021 school year, as the best way to keep teachers, staff, students and therefore society as a whole as safe as possible in the face of the public health emergency. The above events were followed and accompanied by intense public debate about the way schools and universities were dealing with the emergency, a debate which proliferated in the media and on social networks (Greenhow, Staudt Willet & Galvin, 2021; Rehm, Moukarzel, Daly, & del Fresno, 2021; Thelwall & Levitt, 2020). In these circumstances, “the temptation to compare online learning to face-to-face instruction” (Hodges et al., 2020) has, for many, brought about negative considerations along the lines that online learning is no substitute for the “real thing.” At the same time, for others, it has generated (perhaps over-) optimistic expectations that after this “great online learning experiment” (Zimmermann, 2020) our educational institutions and their teaching staff will be more willing than ever to make a permanent shift to online or blended learning. Needless to say, the educational scholarly community also got involved in this debate, initially by viewing the events through the prism of previous research results from the online learning field (Hodges et al., 2020), but soon enough also by gathering evidence and analysing data collected at different stages during the pandemic. The number of conferences and academic journal special issues devoted to this theme testify to the interest it holds for academia. To confirm this, a quick search conducted on the Scopus database in May 2021 using the joint keywords "COVID-19 AND education” resulted in more than 11,000 records, and more than 6,000 for the same search on Web of Science. Also, a search focusing on literature reviews yielded 157 records. Hence, research in the field is advancing at a very fast pace, with implications for the complexity and depth of research designs, methods and results. Although the studies in this special issue were submitted to IJET by September 2020 and thus the research methods and results captured the initial stage of the educational phenomena linked to the pandemic, the issues they raise align well with the most recent debates around the lockdown, concerning technology access, digital and data infrastructures, teaching, evaluation and assessment methods (Carretero Gomez et al., 2021) Broadly speaking, the aim of scholars’ efforts was to deepen our knowledge about issues of a methodological, technological, organisational or policy nature (as well as combinations thereof) that are related to what has been termed “Emergency Remote Education” (ERE) (Williamson, Eynon, & Potter, 2020) or “Emergency Remote Teaching” (ERT) (Hodges et al., 2020). Accordingly, research has focused on investigating the effects on society, educational systems and institutions, to improve understanding of ERE and lay the basis for proposals on how we might better address similar challenges in future. All learning contexts were dealt with school education (Boltz, Yadav, Dillman, & Robertson, 2021; Chiu, 2021; Giovannella, Passarelli, & Persico, 2020; Greenhow, Lewin, & Staudt Willet, 2021; Manca & Delfino, 2021), higher education (Johnson, Veletsianos, & Seaman, 2020; Marek, Chew, & Wu, 2021), informal learning (Greenhalgh, Rosenberg, & Russell, 2021) and, last but not least, teacher professional development (Hartshorne et al., 2020). As might be expected, the conclusions do not all point in the same direction. For example, although the distance between the two poles seems shorter in the research literature, some authors see this emergency as a catalyst for change and an opportunity for educational innovation that should not be missed (Crompton, Burke, Jordan, & Wilson, 2021; Cruz & Grodziak, 2021) while others are much more cautious and raise a number of objections to (simplistic) claims that educational technologies are a ready-made solution for the current crisis (Williamson, Eynon, & Potter, 2020; Giroux, 2021). However, a worry that seems to be shared by most is that the crisis has been acting as an amplifier for some undesirable effects of ICT uptake on a global scale: to mention a few, inequalities in access to education due to social, economic, personal and family conditions (Beaunoyer, Dupéeré, & Guitton, 2020; Manca & Delfino, 2021; Nguyen, Hargittai, & Marler, 2021). Such inequalities are not merely due to lack of digital connectivity: there is a wide range of factors involved in ease of access to educational provision that may be exacerbated by the move to distance teaching at all school levels (Greenhow, Lewin, & Staudt Willet, 2020). However, there is a bright side: “Social, educational, health and digital inequalities have never been clearer. Perhaps now is a time to make a more decisive set of significant social and digital changes” (Williamson, Eynon, & Potter, 2020: p. 111). Now that it’s recognised that the “emperor has no clothes” (Gewerc, Persico, & Rodés-Paragarino, 2020), policy makers cannot disregard problems like the lack of digital competence in teachers and students, the lack of access suffered by marginalized students and the inequalities that derive therefrom. Moreover, there are new, emergent concerns relating to learners’ data travelling from the sphere of public educational institutions to corporations offering public educational institutions free digital services, such as access to and use of online learning platforms (Williamson & Hogan, 2020). As a matter of fact, the European Commission’s "Digital Education Action Plan 2021-2027" (2020) addresses two areas relevant to these issues, namely educators' digital competence and digital infrastructures for learning. These two topics include the above-mentioned concerns about data flows, data privacy and security. In this same vein, a working document published by UNESCO (2020) proposes nine “ideas” to support public education during the pandemic, including the use of open source software and open educational resources: “Education cannot thrive with ready-made content built outside of the pedagogical space and outside of human relationships between teachers and students. Nor can education be dependent on digital platforms controlled by private companies” (p.6).

Gli strumenti di ranking sono ampiamente utilizzati per valutare e confrontare le università, anche da futuri studenti. Tuttavia, gli attuali strumenti di ranking non valutano la dimensione online delle università, che ha visto una recente crescita. Al fine di superare questo limite, il progetto Europeo Creating an Online Dimension for University Rankings (CODUR) ha individuato criteri e indicatori per la dimensione online e ha chiesto a esperti di didattica online di valutarli. In questo articolo, le valutazioni degli esperti sono confrontate con quelle fornite da 55 studenti di università telematiche. Il confronto evidenzia che le prospettive di studenti ed esperti sono complessivamente simili, ma presentano alcune importanti differenze. In particolare, gli studenti accordano maggiore importanza alla qualità del supporto agli studenti e minore alla qualità dell’esperienza d’apprendimento. I risultati dello studio rappresentano un primo passo verso l’integrazione della prospettiva degli studenti nella dimensione online del ranking.

This special issue aims to increase the body of knowledge and evidence concerning the learning potential of video games and gamification, as well as the problems associated with educational uses of games (Persico, Passarelli, Dagnino, Manganello, Earp, & Pozzi, 2019). The selection of papers presented here has been informed by this overarching aim. At the same time, we hope that educators planning to employ games in their classes will find that they provide inspiring examples of educational uses of games. Since designing appropriate and pedagogically sound game-based learning interventions is a difficult endeavour, we do hope that the following articles will contribute to dissipate the fog that often envelops design principles for Game-Based Learning.

University ranking systems are being implemented with the aim of assessing and comparing higher education institutions at a global level. Despite their being increasingly used, rankings are often strongly criticized for their social and economic implications, as well as for limitations in their technical implementation. One of these limitations is that they do not consider the specific characteristics of online education. This study used a participatory approach to define a set of criteria and indicators suitable to reflect the specific nature of distance education. This endeavour will help evaluate and rank online higher education institutions more appropriately than in current practice, where indicators are devised for traditional universities. To this end, several stakeholders and informants were involved in a Delphi study in an attempt to reach the broader higher education institutions (HEI) community. According to the study participants, apart from students’ achievements and general quantitative measures of HEI performance, which are quite common in traditional ranking systems, teaching and student learning experience turned out to be the most important criteria. Student support, teacher support, technological infrastructure, research and organization were deemed middle ground criteria, while sustainability and reputation were regarded as the least important criteria.

This article presents a systematic review of the literature on Digital Scholarship, aimed at better understanding the collocation of this research area at the crossroad of several disciplines and strands of research. The authors analysed 45 articlesin order to draw a picture of research in this area. In the first phase, the articles were classified, and relevant quantitative and qualitative data were analysed. Results showed that three clear strands of research do exist: Digital Libraries, Networked Scholarship and Digital Humanities. Moreover, researchers involved in this research area tackle the problems related to technological uptake in the scholar's profession from different points of view, and define the field in different – often complementary – ways, thus generating the perception of a research area still in need of a unifying vision. In the second phase, authors searched for evidence of the disciplinary contributions and interdisciplinary cohesion of research carried out in this area through the use of bibliometric maps. Results suggest that the area of Digital Scholarship, still in its infancy, is advancing in a rather fragmented way, shaping itself around the above-mentioned strands, each with its own research agenda. However, results from the cross-citation analysis suggest that the Networked Scholarship strand is more cohesive than the others in terms of cross-citations.

Despite wide-scale uptake of gamification in professional training generally, application in Teacher Professional Development (TPD) is still in its infancy. The few experiences reported hitherto mainly concentrate on fostering participation and engagement in the training intervention itself. By contrast, we believe that gamification of TPD can and should have a broader scope, helping to enhance teachers’ motivation to apply newly acquired knowledge and approaches in their daily practice. Accordingly, we have sought to gamify an existing TPD environment called 4Ts, which encourages teachers to design collaborative learning activities for their students via a specific theoretic approach (4Ts). In this paper, we describe the selection and integration of gamification mechanics in 4Ts following an existing methodology that, while generic, has nonetheless proved useful for gamification in the education field. The paper illustrates both the methodology and the experience of gamifying 4Ts with a view to potential transferability to similar, educational contexts.

One of the big challenges faced by research in the Technology Enhanced Learning (TEL) field has to do with the injection of innovation into real educational contexts. Very often, innovative technologies fail to be taken up by practitioners because of difficulties in absorbing both methodological and technological innovation of the target contexts. This may be caused by resistance of the target users associated with conservatism of the contexts, but also by inadequate approaches to innovation promotion or even lack of evidence of the return of investment of the innovation itself. Thus, a crucial need of the TEL field consists in the ability to evaluate both the efficacy of a new technology in the specific context to permeate, and the effectiveness and adequacy of the intervention designed to inject this innovation into the intended situation. This paper contributes to fill in this gap by proposing an approach that joins aspects of Guskey’s model to evaluate the effectiveness of teacher training events together with indicators of the well-known Technology Acceptance Model, generally used to predict acceptance of a new technology. The approach proposed, called T&EAM (Technology & Event Acceptance Model), is illustrated. The discussion concerns its strengths and weaknesses and provides inputs for future applications and research.

Dear readers, it is with great pleasure that we announce some exciting news about our journal. First and foremost, TD Tecnologie Didattiche has changed title to Italian Journal of Educational Technology (IJET). While still in line with the former title, the new one will help us make the journal better known around the globe and improve outreach to an international audience. This change has not been an easy decision to make; founded in 1993, TD Tecnologie Didattiche was the very first journal on educational technology in Italy, and has developed an important tradition and reputation. However, we hope the new title will help us to retain our faithful national readers and authors and, at the same time, allow us to reach a much wider audience of researchers and practitioners outside the country. As you might have noted, the journal cover has also changed, together with its style, size and graphical/typographical layout. This brings the journal into line with scholarly publications in our sector and makes it more readable on mobile devices. In addition to this, we are working towards the objective of having the journal indexed in some of the major bibliographic databases (presently, we are on Google Scholar and DOAJ). We hope you will welcome these changes and keep reading and considering IJET as a possible avenue for your publications. Don’t forget to subscribe to the journal online (http://ijet.itd.cnr.it/) to receive the calls for papers and new issue alerts! You can also follow IJET on Facebook and academia.edu, if you wish to keep in touch with the latest news. Please spread the news and invite your colleagues to read and publish in the Italian Journal of Educational Technology! Donatella Persico, Stefania Manca and Francesca Pozzi

The Peer Review (PR) is a very popular technique to support socio-constructivist and connectivist learning processes, online or face-to-face, at all educational levels, in both formal and informal contexts. The idea behind this technique is that sharing views and opinions with others by discussing with peers and receiving and providing formative feedback enriches the quality of learning. In this study, a class of trainee teachers conducts an online PR. The resulting interactions are analyzed and evaluated by the researchers through the application of an evaluation model based on both quantitative and qualitative data. In particular, two conditions are studied, namely the PR in groups versus the PR in dyads. Results show that students who carried out the PR in groups were less active from the cognitive point of view, while they devoted more effort to deal with organizational matters and discourse facilitation.

Editoriale

Questo articolo si colloca al crocevia tra il settore del Learning Design (LD) e quello del Computer Supported Collaborative Learning (CSCL) in quanto propone un metodo per supportare la progettazione di attività di apprendimento online di tipo collaborativo. Nel settore del CSCL, le ‘tecniche collaborative’ e gli ‘script’ sono considerati concetti fondamentali per progettare attività di apprendimento collaborativo online e le proposte di strumenti tecnologici basati su tali concetti sono numerose. Tuttavia, la maggior parte di questi strumenti nasce con l’obiettivo di rappresentare il progetto educativo, al fine di favorire la comunicazione attorno ad esso, partendo dal presupposto, talvolta implicito, che questo sia già chiaro nella mente del docente progettista, mentre più rari sono gli strumenti tesi a supportare il docente nella fase di ideazione e concettualizzazione di un’attività collaborativa. Il metodo presentato in questo articolo appartiene a questa seconda categoria ed è basato su un modello per la progettazione di attività collaborative e su un gioco ad esso ispirato. Il modello è uno strumento concettuale che supporta la fase di ideazione di un’attività collaborativa definendola in termini di quattro componenti (le 4T): il Task (Compito), il Team/s (Gruppo/i), il Time (Tempo), e la Technology (Tecnologia). Il gioco costituisce uno strumento tangibile costruito sulla base del modello, comprendente delle carte e un tabellone che vengono usati dai progettisti per dare corpo al proprio progetto. Il metodo proposto è stato sperimentato con successo da 44 insegnanti e costituirà la base per lo sviluppo di uno strumento digitale ispirato al metodo stesso.

Cari lettori, Vittorio Midoro, il fondatore di questa rivista, che per 22 anni l’ha diretta contribuendo, con la sua visione talvolta provocatrice e spesso visionaria, al dibattito sulle tecnologie didattiche, ha deciso di.... D.Persico Cari lettori, Dopo 22 anni ho deciso di.... V.Midoro