Marco Kalz is full professor of digital education at the Heidelberg University of Education. His research interest lies on the use of open education, pervasive technologies and formative assessment to support (lifelong) learning and knowledge construction. He has published more than 140 peer-reviewed publications.
Marco is associate editor of the IEEE Transactions on Learning Technologies, and editorial board member of Educational Technology Research and Development and the Journal of Computing in Higher Education. He is a fellow of the Interuniversity Center for Educational Sciences (ICO) and the Dutch research school on information and knowledge systems (SIKS). He is director of the study program E-Learning and Media Education and co-director of the Heidelberg Education for Sustainable Development Center. Over the years he could secure approx. 3.3 Mio EUR of research funding for his institutions from competitive projects with a total budget of 25 Mio EUR. Besides European projects he was and is regularly involved in educational innovation and consulting projects with partners inside and outside of his institutions including clients like the International Labour Organisation, United Nations Environment Program, the European Commission, UNESCO or other international and national organizations.
PhD in Educational Technology, 2009
Open University of the Netherlands
MA Multimedia Didactics, 2003
University Nuremberg-Erlangen
1st State Examination for Teachers, 2000
University of Cologne
Responsibilities include:
Responsibilities include:
Responsibilities include:
Assistierte und einfach generierte intelligente Musiklehre im interaktiven Lernraum mittels Smartphone
Journalistische und crossmediale Kompetenzentwicklung für Studierende
Educational Innovation towards Organizational Development. The Art of Governing Open and Online Education in Dutch Higher Education Institutions
Through the Lens of the Learner: Using Learning Analytics to Predict Learner-Centered Outcomes in Massive Open Online Courses
Open eLearning Content Observatory Services
Skill-based scouting of open user-generated and community-improved content for management education and training
New approaches for resuscitation support and training in the Euregio Meuse-Rhine
Wie Daten Schule und Schulen Daten machen
Doctoral Education for Technology-Enhanced Learning
Mind the Gap. Unravelling learner success and behaviour in Massive Open Online Courses
European Multiple MOOC Aggregator
Entering the EdTech Entrepreneurship World
Structuration of Open Online Education in the Netherlands
Scaling the Unscalable? Interaction and Support in Open Online Education
Ubiquitous technology for lifelong learners
Ambient Learning Displays
Innovative collaboration for Inter-specialty cancer training across Europe
Digital Transition and digital resilience in oncology
Kalz, M. (2021). How did higher education lecturers cope with the pandemic? Invited presentation Media-and-Learning Association Annual Conference.
Kalz, M. (2019). Learning in the digital society. Effects and unintended consequences of mainstreaming of technology-enhanced learning. Invited keynote at the annual CHAIS conference of the Research Center for Innovation in Learning Technologies at the Open University of Israel.
Reward-based gamification strategies are proposed as a promising technique to increase student engagement in Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs), following its success in other small-scale educational settings. However, these strategies imply a number of orchestration tasks ( e.g ., design, management) that are usually carried out by instructors, and which may hinder their use and adoption. Furthermore, some MOOC distinctive features ( e.g ., scale, 24/7 availability, etc.) have considerable implications on how these gamification strategies are orchestrated, resulting in an unmanageable instructors’ workload in cases of manual operation. Therefore, an eventual adoption of gamification in MOOCs calls for automatic systems capable of decreasing the additional workload of instructors. The limitations identified in the current solutions ( e.g ., non-usable graphical interfaces, inflexible gamification designs) led us to propose and develop a new gamification system named GamiTool . An evaluation with 19 MOOC instructors and gamification designers showed the high design expressiveness, usability and potential for adoption of GamiTool. Hence, GamiTool can be used by instructors to improve students’ engagement, and also, by researchers to keep understanding the effects of gamification in MOOC settings.
Leadership in higher can influence the structurally embedding of educational technologies in higher education institutions. However, HEIs are complex pluralistic organizational environments with loosely coupled systems, diffused power and goal ambiguity which makes governance of educational innovations a wicked problem in which they have to balance dynamic complex interactions while also setting out a clear vision and enacting this vision towards organizational goals. This paper analyses four qualitative case studies with a focus on the choices made by leaders in four Dutch universities that aim to contribute to organisational educational innovation. We investigated the data through the lens of complexity leadership theory in which three types of leadership play an important role: administrative leadership (i.e. top-down oriented), adaptive leadership (i.e. bottom-up oriented) and enabling leadership that emerges as a leadership type between administrative and adaptive leadership and contributes to governing innovation in complex environments. This study sheds light on how, in the case of HEIs as complex environments, leaders made strategic choices and followed up on them to enable the innovative potential of the organisation.