Call For Proposals: Special Section on Learning Designs to Support and Improve Workplace Performance
Posted on 2026-02-08Sponsored by the Association for Educational Communications and Technology (AECT), the International Journal of Designs for Learning (IJDL) is a multidisciplinary, international, peer-reviewed online journal dedicated to publishing Design Cases: descriptions of artifacts, environments, and experiences created to promote and support learning in all contexts by designers in any field. IJDL is the premier international scholarly venue for design cases on learning designs, and is indexed in ERIC, Google Scholar, and SCOPUS
This Special Section invites proposals for Design Cases focused on Learning Designs to Support and Improve Workplace Performance, broadly defined. Our goal is to curate high-quality 5–7 Design Cases (with a hard cap of 8), spanning both:
- Long-form/traditional Design Cases, and
- Short-form (Quick Hit) Design Cases.
Collectively, these Design Cases will describe how learning designs operate within, alongside, and sometimes outside the formally recognized traditions of Instructional Design (ID), Human Resource Development (HRD), and Human Performance Technology (HPT).
Although we will be considering a limited number of Design Cases for this Special Section, high-quality proposals and manuscripts that we will not accept for this Special Section might be considered/routed for future standard issues of IJDL.
We welcome proposals for two complementary types of design cases:
Authored by ID, HRD, and HPT practitioners, scholar-practitioners, or graduate students, these Design Cases describe learning artifacts, systems, environments, or technologies that the authors themselves designed and developed to support and/or improve workplace performance.
These Design Cases must foreground:
- A rich description of the design artifacts/systems/experiences/environments, and how the experience of the learner/user interaction with them
- Designers’ high-level process with emphasis on the main design moves/decisions, judgments
- Tradeoffs among organizational, human, technical, and ethical constraints
- The situated nature of performance-oriented learning design work
Authored by ID, HRD, and HPT practitioners, scholar-practitioners, or graduate students, these Design Cases describe learning artifacts, systems, environments, or technologies designed by others and are written from a third-party perspective (example: Spano et al., 2025).
Third-person Design Cases must also foreground a rich description of the design artifacts/systems/experiences/environments, and how the experience of the learner/user interaction with them, and allow authors to:
- Surface tacit design knowledge embedded in existing workplace systems
- Examine consequences of design decisions across contexts
- Engage in design analysis without requiring authorship of the original artifact
Authors interested in this format are encouraged to consult Smith’s discussion of third-person design cases (Smith, 2010) and the IJDL 2014 Special Issue on Historic Design Cases.
An especially exciting dimension of this Special Section is that the Design Cases in either aforementioned category may focus on learning designs that are:
- Explicitly created as learning or workplace performance interventions, intentionally situated within IDT, HRD, or HPT traditions, or
- Not explicitly framed as learning designs by their creators—what we might think of as “learning design in disguise.”
Examples might include (but are not limited to):
- Onboarding systems, workflows, or performance support tools
- Organizational knowledge infrastructures
- Digital platforms, AI-supported systems, or informal learning environments
- Managerial, policy, or procedural artifacts that shape learning and performance without being labeled as such
The emphasis, as always in IJDL, must remain on the designed artifact or system and how learners/users/humans interact with it, rather than on generalized outcomes or prescriptive lessons learned.
A Design Case does not aim to produce generalizable claims or best practices. Instead, authors should engage in careful design reflection that honors the particularity of the design situation, the constraints faced, and the judgments made.
We strongly encourage submissions from:
- Practitioners new to or seasoned in writing Design Cases
- Graduate students (particularly for third-person cases)
- Scholar-practitioners working across academic–industry boundaries
Since writing a Design Case may be a new and uncomfortable space for some, we aim to provide authors with supportive resources and feedback throughout the writing, peer-review, and publication process. Even if you are new to Design Cases or presenting design artifacts, we encourage you to submit a proposal to help expand the dialogue and knowledge sharing on this important aspect of learning design.
To scaffold the process, this call will include an abstract submission phase before full manuscript submission. We have also assembled a suite of resources on writing design cases. We encourage you to draw upon these resources as you draft your abstracts and full-design case manuscripts.
- Boling, E. (2010). The Need for Design Cases: Disseminating Design Knowledge. International Journal of Designs for Learning, 1(1).
- Gray, C. M. (2020). Markers of Quality in Design Precedent. International Journal of Designs for Learning, 11(3), 1–12.
- Howard, C. D. (2011). Writing and Rewriting the Instructional Design Case: A View from Two Sides. International Journal of Designs for Learning, 2(1).
- Moore, S., Howard, C., Boling, E., Leary, H., and Hodges, C. (2023). Research Methods for Design Knowledge: Time for Clarity in Definitions, Methods, and Reporting. Educational Technology Research & Development.
Proposal Requirements (Due March 31, 2026)
Please use this form to submit a proposal. It should include:
- Design case title
- Short description (75–100 words, single-spaced)
- Extended abstract (up to 1,000 words, no less than 200 words, single-spaced)
- Author(s) contact information and positionality (e.g., practitioner, scholar-practitioner, graduate student)
Proposals should clearly indicate whether the submission is:
- First-person or third-person
- Long-form or Quick Hit
The central focus of a Design Case should be on the design artifacts/systems/experiences/environments created and how learners/users interact with them.
Your full manuscript will be due for peer review on August 15, 2026. Per IJDL standards and policy, each manuscript must be peer-reviewed by at least two reviewers, using an anonymous process based on the following scoring rubric. Guest Editors for this Special Section will rely on reviewers’ recommendations to make an Editorial Decision. Final Editorial decision (acceptance or rejection of the manuscript) is the purview of the IJDL Editor-in-Chief.
A Design Case must NOT illustrate a set of "lessons learned" that speaks about the broad generalizability of the design context/situations to other contexts because that is not the purpose of a Design Case. However, we encourage authors to engage in design reflection that speaks to the unique particularity of the design situations they faced without attempting to generate ‘generalizable truth’ similar to ‘implication’ sections in journal articles.
We will notify the authors of our decisions on their proposals by Early–Mid May 2026. We will invite accepted proposals to submit a full manuscript (approximately 5000 words) via the journal's system due Early–Mid August 2026. The manuscripts can contain illustrations or references to other multimedia assets (e.g., video, audio, and animation). If selected for publication, we will request the authors to provide the original files of the multimedia components and permissions to be archived on IJDL’s management system. IJDL uses a double-anonymous peer-review process plus a final editorial review to evaluate article submissions.
March 31, 2026
Abstracts due (through this form)
Early–Mid May 2026
Proposal decisions and author notifications
August 15th, 2026
Full manuscript due for review
Early–Mid September 2026
First round of reviews are completed, and decisions sent to the authors
Early–Mid October 2026
Revised manuscript due
Late October 2026
Final decisions sent to authors
(Acceptances remain tentative pending final editorial review by IJDL Founding Editor-In-Chief, Professor Elizabeth Boling.)
November 30, 2025
Final Editorial Review comments sent to authors
November–December 2026
Copyediting, production, and publication of Design Cases in
(Vol 17 Iss 2 or 3)
We appreciate your interest and look forward to receiving your proposal. Please contact us with your questions at ijdl@iu.edu
The Special Section Guest Editors:
- Dr. Ellen D. Wagner, North Coast EduVisory LLC, IJDL Advisory Board Member
- Dr. Marguerite Koole, University of Saskatchewan, IJDL Advisory Board Member
- Dr. Rafael L. da Silva, Boise State University
- Dr. Seth Martinez, Boise State University, IJDL Advisory Board Member