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

Contributions should relate to the goals of ISDDE, to:

• improve the design and development of educational tools and processes
• increase the impact of good design on educational practice
• build a design community that will move forward toward these goals

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

All contributions will be reviewed by independent referees.

Topics

Areas in which contributions are expected include:

• What can good educational design achieve?
• What makes a good design? Designers’, clients’ and users’ perspectives
• 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

Structure for contributions

• Main text – guideline length: between 10 and 20 printed single-spaced pages, i.e. up to 10,000 words or equivalent.
  Please supply text in Microsoft Word (.doc - not .docx), Open Document (.odt) or plain text format. We will re-format the material for the web, so keep the layout simple and 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 amount of this is at the authors’ discretion, in consultation with editors; likely reader response is the guide. The material for these links should be provided as part of the contribution 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. Please see our tips on image formats.
• Biography and photograph - please include a short (50-250 word) "About the Author" section in your article and, if you wish, a portrait-style digital photograph of yourself.

Within this structure, authors will be allowed considerable freedom in presenting their work. Explanations should be clarified by examples of design, linked from specific points in the text.

Contributions

Those interested in contributing to the journal are asked to send an outline to the Editors -  Susan.McKenney@utwente.nl and Daniel.Pead@nottingham.ac.uk - and to Hugh.Burkhardt@nottingham.ac.uk.