In an era when digital and immersive technologies surrounding human beings, inclusion, equity, and accessibility become a rising focus to serve and center human in education (Estes et al., 2020; Sulecio de Alvarez & Dickson-Deane, 2018). These can be expressed in ubiquitous technologies, such as captions in media (Downey, 2007) and with mobile devices to access MOOCs (Park et al., 2019). These can also be emerging technologies or special domain research, such as educational design research for participants with special needs or identity using technology in education. With the development of technologies and their evolving affordances, it is becoming crucially important to design and develop these products for life and learning with the needs of all human beings in mind, regardless of race, gender, age, identity expressions, ethnicity identity, socioeconomic status, and abilities.

This special issue invites papers on educational design research with focus on emerging technologies serving learners with special needs and diverse backgrounds of gender, race, socioeconomic status, ethnicity, identity expression, ability, and capability. Educational design research is defined as “the iterative development of solutions to practical and complex educational problems, and also provides the context for empirical investigation” (McKenney & Reeves, 2019, p. 6). With the iterative nature, educational design research papers in this special issue are anticipated to provide human-centered study and solution with an inclusive lens of novice types of research methods, research process, user or learner experience design, human-product and human-context interactions, product testing and evaluation, and their societal impacts.

This special issue solicits educational design research papers on emerging technologies, with foci on learning access, serving learners with special needs, enhancing their learning progress, and assessing learning with different tools and formats and in different contexts, centering inclusion. The design research can be at different development stages, ranging from needs and context analysis, learner/user experience, prototype design and development, to implementation and evaluation stage. However, empirical data or evidence at various testing stages (e.g., pilot testing, learner/user experience surveys, formative evaluation, summative evaluation) are strongly encouraged to be included to support the research. The goal of this special issue is to promote the educational research and development of special technologies and create equity and accessibility driven technology-facilitated educational environments.

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Guest Editors:

Xun Ge, Ph.D.

Professor, University of Oklahoma, USA

Juhong Christie Liu, Ph.D.

Associate Professor, James Madison University, USA

Zhe Li, Ph.D.

Research Faculty, University of Osaka, Japan