Paella-istic Contributions of Colaps at the ECTEL 2026 Conference
“And with that, I declare EC-TEL 2026 in session..”
With these words, the director of National University of Distance Education (UNED), Alejandro Cerdá, opened their doors for the participants of the 21st European Conference on Technology-Enhanced Learning (ECTEL) held from 14-18 September in Valencia, Spain. This year, ECTEL once again brought together leading researchers in educational technology, practitioners, educational developers, entrepreneurs, industry leaders, and policy makers to address current challenges in education. Among these distinct quadres, were non-other than members of the Colaps Group from the University of Duisburg-Essen (UDE).
However, Colaps was not there in Valencia simply as participants (or for the delicious paella) , Colaps was actively involved in the organisation of the conference itself. Prof. Dr. Irene-Angelica Chounta served as the Program chair and Dr. Bibeg Limbu served as the Poster & Demo chair alongside their counterparts in the organisation committee of the conference. In addition, Colaps also co-organised two workshops. The CoCreate: Designing Intentional Educational Hackathons to Support Creativity and Entrepreneurship, workshop was organised by Irene in collaboration with partners from the project. The 4th Multimodal Immersive Learning Systems (MILeS) workshop was co-organised by Bibeg in collaboration with the EATEL SIG: MILeS and the NEXT.IN.NRW project GenAIvatar .
Between chairing sessions at the ECTEL and having, oh so many types of paella for lunch, Colaps also presented its research paper “Exploring Learner-Modeling Simulations with Cognitive Walkthroughs: Effects on Mental Load and Mental Effort ” authored by Bibeg Limbu, Yonghao Chen, Yannick Haußmann, and Irene-Angelica Chounta. In this research paper, we report on the formative mixed methods study which evaluated the learner model simulations developed at Colaps in the context of the Intelligent Tutoring Systems module at UDE. Using Cognitive walkthrough with thinkalouds, Interviews, Eye-tracking and Psychometric instruments, the paper also outlines the findings on the cognitive load of users associated with using the simulations. Mona Münstermann also presented her PhD research project during the poster sessions and the Doctoral Consortium at ECTEL. Her project involves developing a theory-based framework called ProFeed, which adapts feedback in programming education to the characteristics of individual learners.
Despite the chorizo, peas, or seafood in our paella, while in Valencia!, the intense but calm week of intellectual discussions in ECTEL 2026 came to a conclusion. However, the socarrat was yet to be had, and we are pleased to announce that this unequivocally belonged to Colaps as it was announced that Irene will serve as the General Chair for ECTEL 2027!!
See you in Koeln, Germany, in 2027!!
