LAUSR

Educational institutions and learning organizations with their teachers, professors, instructors, and students are quickly moving from physical classrooms to online settings due to the global COVID-19 pandemic. Although educational technology has been around for decades, the school administrators, teachers and technology staff are not prepared to address the rapid and dramatic needs to change and shift. Educational Technology Research and Development (ETR&D) is the flagship journal of the Association of Educational Communications and Technology (AECT). As editors of the journal, we saw the responsibility and opportunity to provide research-based and evidence-based resources for educational professionals to integrate digital technologies into their teaching practices. For over 65 years, ETR&D has been publishing top-tier high-quality research and development studies that have explored different aspects of integrating digital technologies in educational settings. However, the published studies were conducted in different contexts and would not be directly applicable for teaching and learning in the rapidly changing pandemic situation. Meanwhile, we were also aware that time is of essence, and that we would not have the time required to solicit new research studies to address the current needs, because it would take time for scholars to conduct such research, and it would take time for new submissions to go through a double-blind peer review process. All things considered, we proposed a unique special issue idea to our ETR&D editorial board members. The idea was to call for commentary or essay-style papers that would situate ETR&D recently published research studies in the current pandemic situation, draw insights from the publications, and provide recommendations for teaching and learning