Guide to contributors

Scope of the Journal

The journal publishes articles which focus in many different ways on educational design.

• ‘Educational’ encompasses formal education for all age levels; education in any workplace; life-long learning; and informal education initiatives including public institutions and community activities.
• ‘Design’ includes the design of products, programs, services and policies.
• The journal is particularly known for its coverage of STEM education, broadly construed, but welcomes contributions from elsewhere.
• Our e-journal format supports rich use of exemplification, demonstrating design and development processes and outcomes through examples. Authors can link and share resources (e.g. online tools; downloadable products) and information about how designs are used (e.g. video of teachers, learners, or contexts).

Short and long contributions of various types are welcome. The suggestions below are intended to illustrate but not prescribe.

• Well researched articles which report empirical or theory-based evidence on solutions to an educational design problem. Examples: reporting a study of impact of an educational product, or teacher education program, or citizen science initiative, linking impact to design features. (Typical length 4000 – 10000 words)
• Descriptions and analyses of educational products, programs, services or policies, with focus on design decisions. Examples: a set of national standards for K-12 History, assessing ‘21st century skills’, creation of educational software, making a museum display accessible to visually impaired, design of in-service teacher education, a policy framework for links between schools and vocational education. (Typical length 4000 – 10000 words)
• Short reports of educational events, products, programs, highlighting design features that might be used by others. Examples: organising a ‘maths day’, a revised assessment for music theory, a program introducing children to engineering principles, a conference working group report on using video to enhance teaching practice. (Typical length 1000 – 3000 words)
• Possibly controversial proposals for improving aspects of educational design, designed to provoke debate, reflection or action. (Typical length 1000 – 3000 words)
• Responses to published articles. (Typical length 1000 – 3000 words)

Focus on educational design

Giving your article or short report a focus on educational design can be accomplished by addressing one or more of the following aspects.

• Design premises, principles, heuristics or considerations – highlight generalizable knowledge of the design itself or the design process that can be taken from one design project to another.
• Consider criteria for good design from the perspectives of designers, clients and users – why might/does your good educational design achieve and why is it good?
• Design and development processes – discuss aspects such as processes that were followed, should be followed, or should not be followed.
• Provide well-founded scholarly evidence for views expressed. Describe how the insights were obtained and carefully explain the nature of the data or theory.

Criteria

All contributions are reviewed by independent referees.

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.

Style for contributions

The text should be between 1000 and 10 000 words. This rule will only be varied in exceptional cases. The preferred length for articles is less than 7500 words. The title should be shorter than 80 characters (including spaces), preferably fewer.

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.

Style - We do not rigorously enforce a style but APA style (see Wikipedia) is suitable for references and citations. All references must be in the reference list, and all items in the reference list must be referred to in the main text.

Illustrative exemplification, using embedded links, is encouraged. The material for these links should be provided at the time of manuscript submission as images, PDFs or even (in consultation with the Editors) videos or interactive applets. Videos should be supplied as mp4. Software applets created in HTML5/Javascript can usually be integrated into your article as "pop-ups" if you supply the appropriate files - or a long-term, stable URL – but please provide screen shots or video recordings as a fall-back. Note that support for Flash has been discontinued by most browsers and Java is increasingly difficult to run so we can no longer accept materials or links in these formats. Contact Daniel Pead to discuss what can be achieved.

If you include illustrations in the main text, please also supply the original files separately (e.g. tiff/jpeg/png/eps/ai/eps/psd) wherever possible. Always supply the highest resolution available (we can always reduce it), and at least 1000 pixels wide for main illustrations (we can make allowances for, e.g. screenshots of older software). Keep multi-part “figures” separate so they can be laid out flexibly. Note that jpeg should only be used for images that are predominantly photographic).

Educational Designer requires an exclusive, worldwide license to reproduce and distribute the article on all media, with permission to authors to reproduce and share the article in support of personal, academic, research and teaching activities. Copyright release must be obtained by the author for any third-party materials you include - although these need not be exclusive. After the article has been accepted, and before the article appears, written permission to publish must be supplied to the editors. We are happy to discuss permissive licensing options (Creative Commons etc.) on a per-article basis.

Abstract – include a self-contained 100-200 word abstract that will appear on the issue ‘home page’.

Biography and photograph - please include a short (50-250 word) ‘About the Author’ section at the front of your article and, if you are willing, a portrait-style digital photograph (at least 400x400 pixels) of yourself.

Adhering to these guidelines will make all our (unpaid) jobs easier, but please feel free to discuss any problems or obstacles they present with the editorial team.

Contributions

Those interested in contributing to the journal are asked to send manuscripts, abstracts or outlines to the Editor-in-chief Christian Schunn (schunn@pitt.edu) copied to the Assistant Editor Róisín Neururer (roisin.neururer@ucdconnect.ie).