E-Learning and Digital Media
e-Learning and ILT in the Lifelong Learning Sector
This journal explores the ways that different disciplines and alternative approaches can shed light on the study of technically mediated education. Working at the intersection of theoretical psychology, sociology, history, politics and philosophy it poses new questions and offers new answers for research and practice related to digital technologies in education. The change of the title of the journal in 2010 from E-Learning to E-Learning and Digital Media is expressive of this new and emphatically interdisciplinary orientation, and also reflects the fact that technologically-mediated education needs to be located within the political economy and informational ecology of changing mediatic forms.
This journal is a member of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE).
Policy Statement
We now live in a socially networked universe in which the material conditions for the formation, circulation, and utilization of knowledge and learning are rapidly changing from an industrial to an information and media-based economy. Increasingly the emphasis has fallen on the ‘learning economy’ and on improving learning systems and networks, and the acquisition of new digital literacies as a central aspect of development considered in personal, community, regional, national and global contexts. These mega-trends signal both changes in the production and consumption of symbolic goods and also associated changes in their contexts of use. They accent the learner’s active co-production of meaning in a variety of networked public and private spaces, where knowledge and learning emerge as new principles of social stratification, social mobility and identity formation.
Communications and information technologies or media not only diminish the effect of distance they also thereby conflate the local and the global, the private and the public, ‘work’ and ‘home’. Digitalization of learning systems increases the speed, circulation and exchange of knowledge, highlighting the importance of the digital archive, digital representations of all symbolic and cultural resources, and new literacies and models of text management and reception. At the same time the radical juxtaposition of text, image, motion and sound, and development of new information and knowledge infrastructures have created new learning opportunities in formal and informal areas, while encouraging the emergence of a global media network linked with a communications network together with the emergence a universal Euro-American consumer culture and the rise of edutainment media conglomerates. The question, therefore, of who owns and designs learning systems and media formats and content is of paramount political and philosophical importance.
It is often claimed that digital technologies and mediatic forms hold great promise for improving the quality, flexibility and effectiveness of education. E-learning is presented as a new panacea offering unrestricted access, conquering distance, and providing the means for intercultural socialization and collaboration. Some theorists and practitioners argue that with the current ‘revolution’ in digital media and technologies, the concept and practice of the education itself will change radically. It is predicted that education institutions will offer a broader range of teaching and learning opportunities to provide for a much more diverse student body – or that they will cease to exist altogether. Learning experiences will become more closely tailored to the needs of individuals and groups: personalisation, customization and individualization are the policy watch words. Learning and teaching based on new mediatic and technical forms will boost the quality of education and overcome the traditional limitations of time and space associated with the industrial model of education. These new forms also will help to provide improved access and increased effectiveness, especially for students suffering disabilities or those from remote areas, and they will also shape the future of lifelong learning, offering flexible programmes of study to those with work or family commitments. In short, it is claimed that learning, teaching and educational institutions will become transformed in the new environment. Students will bring radically new styles of learning and communication to the classroom, and will expect related services and support from their educational providers.
It is not surprising, then, that research occurring at the confluence of education and digital media and technologies – such as e-learning, instructional design and media education – has thus far had the effect of re-affirming long-standing assumptions about the nature of media, technology, human activity and of the interaction of humans with these forms – assumptions that have long been cast into doubt in other fields of research. New mediatic forms and contents, for example, tend to be measured against their more ‘authoritative’ print precursors, with research and teaching cast in terms of scrutiny and critique. Technical progress, as another example, is typically seen as single-handedly ‘impacting’ educational practices, and human action is similarly understood as fundamentally rational, rule-bound and thus predictable.
These understandings have been contradicted by the complex unpredictability of technical, social, economic and educational continuities and transformations, which defy reductive explanation or predictive calculation. The challenge remains, then, for research and practice in fields like media education to be brought into closer contact with ongoing developments in theory, as well as to reflect rapidly developing social and technical practices and configurations. The study of educational technologies and media literacies needs to encompass the cultures, discourses, and experiences co-emergent with related practices, and to draw more deeply from a range of disciplines, including theoretical psychology, sociology, history, politics and philosophy.
This journal takes up this challenge by exploring the ways that different disciplines and alternative approaches can shed light on the study of technically mediated education, pose new questions and offer new answers for these fields. The change of the title of the journal in 2010 from E-Learning to E-Learning and Digital Media is expressive of this emphatically interdisciplinary orientation, and also reflects the fact that technologically-mediated education needs to be located within the political economy and informational ecology of changing mediatic forms.
E-Learning and Digital Media is a peer-reviewed international journal directed towards the study and research of e-learning in its diverse aspects: pedagogical, curricular, sociological, economic, philosophical and political.
This journal explores the ways that different disciplines and alternative approaches can shed light on the study of technically mediated education. Working at the intersection of theoretical psychology, sociology, history, politics and philosophy it poses new questions and offers new answers for research and practice related to digital technologies in education. The change of the title of the journal in 2010 from E-Learning to E-Learning and Digital Media is expressive of this new and emphatically interdisciplinary orientation, and also reflects the fact that technologically-mediated education needs to be located within the political economy and informational ecology of changing mediatic forms.
| Richard Heraud | Independent Researcher |
| Michael A. Peters | Beijing Normal University |
| Tina A.C. Besley | Beijing Normal University, China |
| Markus Deimann | Lubeck University of Applied Sciences, Germany |
| Andrew Denton | Auckland University of Technology, New Zealand |
| Stanley Frielick | Ako Aotearoa, New Zealand |
| Andrew Gibbons | Auckland University of Technology, New Zealand |
| Petar Jandric | University of Applied Sciences, Zagreb, Croatia |
| Shannon Lowe | Thompson Rivers University, Canada |
| Chris Naughton | Independent Scholar, New Zealand |
| John Roder | University of Auckland, New Zealand |
| Carl H. Smith | Ravensbourne, UK |
| James Paul Gee | University of Wisconsin, Madison, USA |
| Colin Lankshear | University of Ballarat, Australia |
| Kurt Squire | University of Wisconsin, Madison, USA |
| Mohammed Abdel-Razek | King Abdulaziz University, Saudi Arabia |
| Donna Alvermann | University of Georgia, USA |
| N. Balasubramanian | Bharathiar University, India |
| Siân Bayne | University of Edinburgh, UK |
| Chris Bigum | Deakin University, Australia |
| Svana Bjarnason | Manager, Observatory on Borderless Higher Education, UK |
| Tara Brabazon | Charles Sturt University, Australia |
| Chip Bruce | University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign, USA |
| Edwin P. Christmann | Slippery Rock University, USA |
| Paul Cowan | University of Waikato, New Zealand |
| Suzanne de Castell | Simon Fraser University, Canada |
| Markus Deimann | Lubeck University of Applied Sciences, Germany |
| Nellie Deutsch | Independent scholar, Israel |
| Richard Edwards | University of Stirling, UK |
| Beatriz Fainholc | National University of La Plata, Argentina |
| Peg Finders | Augsburg College, Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA |
| Dianne Forbes | University of Waikato, New Zealand |
| Lesley Jane Gourlay | UCL Institute of Education, University College London, UK |
| Christina Haas | Kent State University, USA |
| Margaret Hagood | College of Charleston, South Carolina, USA |
| Wen-Hao David Huang | University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA |
| Lisa Hunter | University of Waikato, New Zealand |
| Michele Jacobsen | University of Calgary, Canada |
| Sheila Jagannathan | World Bank Institute, Washington, USA |
| Jane Kenway | Monash University, Australia |
| Bert Lambeir | Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium |
| Kevin Leander | Vanderbilt University, USA |
| Amy S.C. Leh | California State University, San Bernardino, USA |
| Tim Luke | Virginia Tech, USA |
| Hugh Mackay | Open University in Wales, United Kingdom |
| Jackie Marsh | University of Sheffield, UK |
| Steve McCarty | World Association for Online Education, Japan |
| John Potter | Institute of Education, University of London, UK |
| Peter Roberts | University of Canterbury, New Zealand |
| Leonie Rowan | Deakin University, Australia |
| Ramesh C. Sharma | Indira Gandhi National Open University, India |
| Ilana Snyder | Monash University, Australia |
| Phil Strange | Fujitsu Services, UK |
| Juha Suoranta | University of Tampere, Finland |
| Lynde Tan | University of Western Sydney, Australia |
| Marek Tesar | University of Auckland |
| Sharon Tettegah | University of California-Santa Barbara, USA |
| Steven Thorne | Portland State University, USA |
| Qingyan Tian | Ocean University of China, China |
| Arun Kumar Tripathi | Dresden University of Technology, Germany |
| Ann de Vaney | University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA |
| Dana Wilber | Montclair State University, USA |
| Nicola Yelland | University of Melbourne, Australia |
| Jialin Yi | Northwestern Memorial Hospital, Chicago, USA |
Manuscript Submission Guidelines: E-Learning and Digital Media
This Journal is a member of the Committee on Publication Ethics.
Please read the guidelines below then visit the Journal’s submission site http://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/ldm to upload your manuscript. Please note that manuscripts not conforming to these guidelines may be returned. Remember you can log in to the submission site at any time to check on the progress of your paper through the peer review process.
Only manuscripts of sufficient quality that meet the aims and scope of E-Learning and Digital Media will be reviewed.
There are no fees payable to submit or publish in this journal.
As part of the submission process you will be required to warrant that you are submitting your original work, that you have the rights in the work, and that you have obtained and can supply all necessary permissions for the reproduction of any copyright works not owned by you, that you are submitting the work for first publication in the Journal and that it is not being considered for publication elsewhere and has not already been published elsewhere. Please see our guidelines on prior publication and note that E-Learning and Digital Media may accept submissions of papers that have been posted on pre-print servers; please alert the Editorial Office when submitting (contact details are at the end of these guidelines) and include the DOI for the preprint in the designated field in the manuscript submission system. Authors should not post an updated version of their paper on the preprint server while it is being peer reviewed for possible publication in the journal. If the article is accepted for publication, the author may re-use their work according to the journal's author archiving policy.
If your paper is accepted, you must include a link on your preprint to the final version of your paper.
If you have any questions about publishing with SAGE, please visit the SAGE Journal Solutions Portal
- What do we publish?
1.1 Aims & Scope
1.2 Article types
1.3 Writing your paper - Editorial policies
2.1 Peer review policy
2.2 Authorship
2.3 Acknowledgements
2.4 Funding
2.5 Declaration of conflicting interests
2.6 Research Data - Publishing policies
3.1 Publication ethics
3.2 Contributor's publishing agreement
3.3 Open access and author archiving - Preparing your manuscript
4.1 Formatting
4.2 Artwork, figures and other graphics
4.3 Supplemental material
4.4 Reference style
4.5 English language editing services - Submitting your manuscript
5.1 ORCID
5.2 Information required for completing your submission
5.3 Permissions - On acceptance and publication
6.1 SAGE Production
6.2 Online First publication
6.3 Access to your published article
6.4 Promoting your article - Further information
Before submitting your manuscript to E-Learning and Digital Media, please ensure you have read the journal description.
The journal publishes five kinds of submissions:
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- Quality academic articles (generally 6000-8000 words);
- National and international policy reports (unspecified length);
- Policy research notes (2000 words maximum)
- Reviews (1000 words maximum)
- Interchanges (interviews, right of reply etc.)
Books for review should be sent to:
Michele Knobel & Dana Wilber
Department of Early Childhood
Elementary and Literacy Education
College of Education & Human Services
3173 University Hall, Montclair State University
Montclair, NJ 07043
USA.
The SAGE Author Gateway has some general advice and on how to get published, plus links to further resources. SAGE Author Services also offers authors a variety of ways to improve and enhance their article including English language editing, plagiarism detection, and video abstract and infographic preparation.
1.3.1 Make your article discoverable
When writing up your paper, think about how you can make it discoverable. The title, keywords and abstract are key to ensuring readers find your article through search engines such as Google. For information and guidance on how best to title your article, write your abstract and select your keywords, have a look at this page on the Gateway: How to Help Readers Find Your Article Online.
E-Learning and Digital Media strives to undertake rigorous peer review of all submissions. From 17th November 2014, submissions made to E-Learning and Digital Media will always adhere to a double-anonymize reviewing policy in which the identity of both the reviewer and author are always concealed from both parties. Proposals for Special Issues should be sent to the Editor. In addition to the double-anonymize peer review of individual papers, Special Issues will also be reviewed separately as a whole issue by the Editorial team.
Peer Review Process: Each manuscript is reviewed by at least two referees. All manuscripts are reviewed as rapidly as possible, and an editorial decision is generally reached within 4-6 weeks of submission.
Decisions on manuscripts will be taken as rapidly as possible. Authors should expect to have reviewer’s comments within approximately 6 weeks. In general, Editors will seek advice from two or more expert reviewers about the scientific content and presentation of submitted articles.
All manuscripts are reviewed initially by the Editors and only those papers that meet the scientific and editorial standards of the journal, and fit within the aims and scope of the journal, will be sent for outside review.
All parties who have made a substantive contribution to the article should be listed as authors. Principal authorship, authorship order, and other publication credits should be based on the relative scientific or professional contributions of the individuals involved, regardless of their status. A student is usually listed as principal author on any multiple-authored publication that substantially derives from the student’s dissertation or thesis.
Please note: You may include an author biographies for the author/s of your manuscript upon submission.
All contributors who do not meet the criteria for authorship should be listed in an Acknowledgements section. Examples of those who might be acknowledged include a person who provided purely technical help, or a department chair who provided only general support.
2.3.1 Third party submissions
Where an individual who is not listed as an author submits a manuscript on behalf of the author(s), a statement must be included in the Acknowledgements section of the manuscript and in the accompanying cover letter. The statements must:
• Disclose this type of editorial assistance – including the individual’s name, company and level of input
• Identify any entities that paid for this assistance
• Confirm that the listed authors have authorized the submission of their manuscript via third party and approved any statements or declarations, e.g. conflicting interests, funding, etc.
Where appropriate, SAGE reserves the right to deny consideration to manuscripts submitted by a third party rather than by the authors themselves.
2.3.2 Writing assistance
Individuals who provided writing assistance, e.g. from a specialist communications company, do not qualify as authors and so should be included in the Acknowledgements section. Authors must disclose any writing assistance – including the individual’s name, company and level of input – and identify the entity that paid for this assistance”).
It is not necessary to disclose use of language polishing services.
Please supply any personal acknowledgements separately to the main text to facilitate anonymous peer review.
E-Learning and Digital Media requires all authors to acknowledge their funding in a consistent fashion under a separate heading. Please visit the Funding Acknowledgements page on the SAGE Journal Author Gateway to confirm the format of the acknowledgment text in the event of funding, or state that: This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.
2.5 Declaration of conflicting interests
E-Learning and Digital Media encourages authors to include a declaration of any conflicting interests and recommends you review the good practice guidelines on the SAGE Journal Author Gateway.
The journal is committed to facilitating openness, transparency and reproducibility of research, and has the following research data sharing policy. For more information, including FAQs please visit the SAGE Research Data policy pages.
Subject to appropriate ethical and legal considerations, authors are encouraged to:
- share your research data in a relevant public data repository
- include a data availability statement linking to your data. If it is not possible to share your data, we encourage you to consider using the statement to explain why it cannot be shared.
- cite this data in your research
SAGE is committed to upholding the integrity of the academic record. We encourage authors to refer to the Committee on Publication Ethics’ International Standards for Authors and view the Publication Ethics page on the SAGE Author Gateway.
3.1.1 Plagiarism
E-Learning and Digital Media and SAGE take issues of copyright infringement, plagiarism or other breaches of best practice in publication very seriously. We seek to protect the rights of our authors and we always investigate claims of plagiarism or misuse of published articles. Equally, we seek to protect the reputation of the journal against malpractice. Submitted articles may be checked with duplication-checking software. Where an article, for example, is found to have plagiarised other work or included third-party copyright material without permission or with insufficient acknowledgement, or where the authorship of the article is contested, we reserve the right to take action including, but not limited to: publishing an erratum or corrigendum (correction); retracting the article; taking up the matter with the head of department or dean of the author's institution and/or relevant academic bodies or societies; or taking appropriate legal action.
3.1.2 Prior publication
If material has been previously published it is not generally acceptable for publication in a SAGE journal. However, there are certain circumstances where previously published material can be considered for publication. Please refer to the guidance on the SAGE Author Gateway or if in doubt, contact the Editor at the address given below.
3.2 Contributor's publishing agreement
Before publication, SAGE requires the author as the rights holder to sign a Journal Contributor’s Publishing Agreement. SAGE’s Journal Contributor’s Publishing Agreement is an exclusive licence agreement which means that the author retains copyright in the work but grants SAGE the sole and exclusive right and licence to publish for the full legal term of copyright. Exceptions may exist where an assignment of copyright is required or preferred by a proprietor other than SAGE. In this case copyright in the work will be assigned from the author to the society. For more information please visit the SAGE Author Gateway.
3.3 Open access and author archiving
E-Learning and Digital Media offers optional open access publishing via the SAGE Choice programme. For more information on Open Access publishing options at SAGE please visit SAGE Open Access. For information on funding body compliance, and depositing your article in repositories, please visit SAGE’s Author Archiving and Re-Use Guidelines and Publishing Policies.
4. Preparing your manuscript for submission
The preferred format for your manuscript is Word. LaTeX files are also accepted. Word and (La)Tex templates are available on the Manuscript Submission Guidelines page of our Author Gateway.
4.2 Artwork, figures and other graphics
For guidance on the preparation of illustrations, pictures and graphs in electronic format, please visit SAGE’s Manuscript Submission Guidelines.
This journal is able to host additional materials online (e.g. datasets, podcasts, videos, images etc) alongside the full-text of the article. For more information please refer to our guidelines on submitting supplementary files.
E-Learning and Digital Media adheres to the SAGE Harvard reference style. View the SAGE Harvard guidelines to ensure your manuscript conforms to this reference style.
If you use EndNote to manage references, you can download the SAGE Harvard EndNote output file.
Please note: All references in your manuscript must be in-text citations upon submission. For instruction and examples, please click here.
4.5 English language editing services
Authors seeking assistance with English language editing, translation, or figure and manuscript formatting to fit the journal’s specifications should consider using SAGE Language Services. Visit SAGE Language Services on our Journal Author Gateway for further information.
E-Learning and Digital Media is hosted on SAGE Track, a web based online submission and peer review system powered by ScholarOne™ Manuscripts. Visit http://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/ldm to login and submit your article online.
IMPORTANT: Please check whether you already have an account in the system before trying to create a new one. If you have reviewed or authored for the journal in the past year it is likely that you will have had an account created. For further guidance on submitting your manuscript online please visit ScholarOne Online Help.
As part of our commitment to ensuring an ethical, transparent and fair peer review process SAGE is a supporting member of ORCID, the Open Researcher and Contributor ID. ORCID provides a unique and persistent digital identifier that distinguishes researchers from every other researcher, even those who share the same name, and, through integration in key research workflows such as manuscript and grant submission, supports automated linkages between researchers and their professional activities, ensuring that their work is recognized.
The collection of ORCID IDs from corresponding authors is now part of the submission process of this journal. If you already have an ORCID ID you will be asked to associate that to your submission during the online submission process. We also strongly encourage all co-authors to link their ORCID ID to their accounts in our online peer review platforms. It takes seconds to do: click the link when prompted, sign into your ORCID account and our systems are automatically updated. Your ORCID ID will become part of your accepted publication’s metadata, making your work attributable to you and only you. Your ORCID ID is published with your article so that fellow researchers reading your work can link to your ORCID profile and from there link to your other publications.
If you do not already have an ORCID ID please follow this link to create one or visit our ORCID homepage to learn more.
5.2 Information required for completing your submission
You will be asked to provide contact details and academic affiliations for all co-authors via the submission system and identify who is to be the corresponding author. These details must match what appears on your manuscript. The affiliation listed in the manuscript should be the institution where the research was conducted. If an author has moved to a new institution since completing the research, the new affiliation can be included in a manuscript note at the end of the paper. At this stage please ensure you have included all the required statements and declarations and uploaded any additional supplementary files (including reporting guidelines where relevant).
Please also ensure that you have obtained any necessary permission from copyright holders for reproducing any illustrations, tables, figures or lengthy quotations previously published elsewhere. For further information including guidance on fair dealing for criticism and review, please see the Copyright and Permissions page on the SAGE Author Gateway.
6. On acceptance and publication
Your SAGE Production Editor will keep you informed as to your article’s progress throughout the production process. Proofs will be made available to the corresponding author via our editing portal SAGE Edit or by email, and corrections should be made directly or notified to us promptly. Authors are reminded to check their proofs carefully to confirm that all author information, including names, affiliations, sequence and contact details are correct, and that Funding and Conflict of Interest statements, if any, are accurate.
Online First allows final articles (completed and approved articles awaiting assignment to a future issue) to be published online prior to their inclusion in a journal issue, which significantly reduces the lead time between submission and publication. Visit the SAGE Journals help page for more details, including how to cite Online First articles.
6.3 Access to your published article
SAGE provides authors with online access to their final article.
Publication is not the end of the process! You can help disseminate your paper and ensure it is as widely read and cited as possible. The SAGE Author Gateway has numerous resources to help you promote your work. Visit the Promote Your Article page on the Gateway for tips and advice.
Any correspondence, queries or additional requests for information on the manuscript submission process should be sent to the E-Learning and Digital Media editorial office as follows:
Richard Heraud, Managing Editor, eldmeditors@gmail.com