In the framework of the project Western Eastern Teachers' Education Network (WETEN) funded by the Tempus program the network of university teachers were established to share expertise on effective teaching and learning in universities. This network for pedagogical innovation in higher education brought together the experts from EU to share good practice and new teaching methods with academic staff from two eastern countries, Moldova and Ukraine. The learner centered concept was analyzed and guidelines for creating learner centered courses were developed and piloted. The concepts and some experiences in course design were also implemented by trained teachers in the developed courses within the WETEN project.

This article theorizes the functional relationship between the human components (i.e., scholars) and non-human components (i.e., structural configurations) of academic domains. It is organized around the following question: in what ways have scholars formed and been formed by the structural configurations of their academic domain? The article uses as a case study the academic domain of education and technology to examine this question. Its authorship approach is innovative, with a worldwide collection of academics (99 authors) collaborating to address the proposed question based on their reflections on daily social and academic practices. This collaboration followed a three-round process of contributions via email. Analysis of these scholars’ reflective accounts was carried out, and a theoretical proposition was established from this analysis. The proposition is of a mutual (yet not necessarily balanced) power (and therefore political) relationship between the human and non-human constituents of an academic realm, with the two shaping one another. One implication of this proposition is that these non-human elements exist as political ‘actors’, just like their human counterparts, having ‘agency’ – which they exercise over humans. This turns academic domains into political (functional or dysfunctional) ‘battlefields’ wherein both humans and non-humans engage in political activities and actions that form the identity of the academic domain. For more information about the authorship approach, please see Al Lily AEA (2015) A crowd-authoring project on the scholarship of educational technology. Information Development. doi: 10.1177/0266666915622044.

The transfer to distance education imposed to the universities in an emergency regime raised many challenges for the teachers, regardless of their level of readiness for this process. In addition to the management and the infrastructure aspects, the shift to distance education revealed a set of problems inherent to the teaching & learning & assessment regardless the face-to-face, blended, online or distance forms of education. The paper highlights the challenges related to adoption of e-didactics; the common features and differences between classical didactics and didactics integrated with Information and Communication Technologies (ICT), focused on learning design; the weaknesses and the impediments for the implementation of Open Educational Resources (OER); the professional competences that teachers must demonstrate in the digital age. Not only the purely digital competencies of teachers are important, but to a much greater extent, the professional competencies related to the scientific content they teach, to didactics in general and didactics of the discipline in particular, to transposing content into digital format via ICT, to skills in e-didactics. The concept of e-didactics is practically missing in the Romanian Education area; respectively there is no research in this field to be made public by academics in Romanian space. The descriptions and statements in this article are based on works from English, available on the Web. The Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge (TPACK) framework model is described shortly. Some aspects related to the digital divide are discussed. The development of the concept didactics in e-didactics and the understanding of the correlation between them offer new opportunities to implement the teaching & learning & assessment process in the digital age.

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Higher Education Institutions (HEI) are facing a number of problems during the last decades: the need to update the curricula to make it compatible with the similar ones from other national and European universities; demand to update the content and the pedagogical approach due to knowledge, technological and research development. Open Educational Resources (OER) might be a sound strategy for institutions to meet these challenges. At the same time OER are themselves one of the challenges that the teachers are faced with. OER could be implemented in courses in different ways, depending on the types of OER and the educational philosophy adopted by the teachers. The paper describes some challenges for implementing Open Educational Resources by teachers in Higher Education in Moldova: the level of awareness on availability and usage of OER; fair use matters; quality assurance of resources; pedagogical approaches for implementing OER into teaching and learning. The paper also grasps the issues of the digital divide that emerge when investigating these challenges. The judgment is based on the literature analysis and on the author’s teaching experience within courses for initial and continuous professional teachers’ training.