Guide to contributors

Rationale

ISDDE has established Educational Designer as an e-journal for the following reasons:

• To enhance communication between its members and with others
• Because rich exemplification is often essential in discussing design, a web-structure with linked examples communicates better than purely linear papers
• Because an e-journal costs less to readers and to authors’ institutions

Audiences

The main audiences for Educational Designer are:

• Educational designers with a substantial commitment to design and development
• Leaders of design and development groups
• Strategists in education
• Funders and clients of systematic design and development
• Educational design researchers

Others with an interest in the quality of educational materials will find much of interest.

Criteria

All contributions are reviewed by independent referees to ensure that the following criteria are met.

Contributions should relate to the goals of ISDDE, namely to:

• Improve the design and development of educational tools and processes for other people to use
• Increase the impact of good design on educational practice
• Build a design community that will move forward toward these goals

Contributions should be original work of the author(s) and not have been published elsewhere. They must be free from copyright restrictions that affect publication here. We normally ask authors to grant Educational Designer a license to publish the article that is exclusive for as long as ED remains available; however, we will consider releasing individual articles under a Creative Commons, or similar license, where the author requests this.

Content and conceptual considerations

Educational Designer contributions address one or more of the following:

• Design and development processes – The processes that were followed, should be followed, or should not be followed. The relative merits and drawbacks of pathways to design when it comes to resource development, professional development, implementation, diffusion, and/or scaling should be discussed.
• Design premises, principles or considerations – Generalizable knowledge from one design project to another. The generalizable content can take many forms: knowledge, attitudes, skills, resources and/or collaboration that foster or hinder robust design. This could pertain to the design process, the design context, or to the design itself.
• Rich use of exemplification – Demonstrating design and development processes that can inform others through examples. Where meaningful, authors are encouraged to make full use of the on-line opportunities to link and share resources (e.g. online tools; downloadable products) or information about how designs are used (e.g. video of teachers, learners, or contexts).
• Evidence – Empirical support for the views expressed. Authors are encouraged to share empirically-grounded design insights, and to describe how the data and insights were obtained.

Possible topics

Areas on which contributions might focus include:

• What can good educational design achieve?
• From the perspectives of designers, clients and/or users, what constitutes good design and why?
• Issues in design and design research
• Development processes
• The roles of evaluation
• Building a professional design community and its influence on practice
• Research methods, including documentation of outcomes
• Theory of design
• Long term strategies

Style for contributions

• Main text – Guideline length: preferably not exceeding 10,000 words.
  Please supply text in Microsoft Word (.doc/.docx), Open Document (.odt) or plain text format. We will re-format the material for the web, so keep the layout simple and just use the built-in heading and list styles.
• References - We do not rigourously enforce a style but APA citation style (Wikipedia) is suitable.
• Footnotes - use these sparingly: since articles are presented online as continuous, scrolling text, all "footnotes" will be moved to the end of the article.
• Illustrative exemplification – using embedded links. The material for these links should be provided along with manuscript submission as images, PDFs or even (in consultation with the Editors) videos or interactive applets. Links to other websites will be seen as references.
  Please remember to seek permission to use any third-party materials you include.
  If you include illustrations in the main text, please also supply the original .tiff/.jpg/.png/.ai files if available.
  Software applets created in Flash, Java or other browser-based technologies can usually be integrated into your article as "pop-ups" if you supply the appropriate .jar or .swf files.
• Biography and photograph - please include a short (50-250 word) "About the Author" section in your article and, if you are willing, a portrait-style digital photograph of yourself.

Contributions

Those interested in contributing to the journal are asked to send manuscripts, abstracts or outlines to the editors: Susan.McKenney@utwente.nl and Daniel.Pead@nottingham.ac.uk