History - ETLTC & ACM Chapter

The ETLTC was established in 2018 as a local conference organizing body located at the University of Aizu. We started organizing conferences with students from the University of Aizu and the Karlsruhe University of Applied Sciences, Germany. But later, we started extending our network with students participating from many different countries. We grew in strength from year to year, and today, we have a huge network of participants with students and faculty representing at least 20 different countries from around the world and 6 continents. We started diversifying with not only topics in technology and societal applications, but also technical communication, information management, health communication and informatics, and education and society. People participate in our conferences from all works of life. ETLTC is now a registered company in the United States. 

The ACM Chapter on Elearning and Technical Communication established in 2010 and based out of the University of Aizu, Japan was set up as a regional body with an aim for global networking. This chapter has been organizing conferences for the last 10 years on different topics related to eLearning, computer-assisted language learning, hot topics in computer science, smart cities, and technical communication.

Starting in 2019, the ACM chapter started a collaborative initiative with Karlsruhe University of Applied Sciences, Germany along with other global university partners such as the University of Monterrey (UDEM), Mexico, and Japan Technical Communicators Association (JTCA) where students from the University of Aizu comes together with the students from the Department of Communication and Media, HSKA, Germany towards a joint project-based learning initiative with joint coursework, collaboration, and networking. The initiative resulted in an ACM international conference where students made joint presentations, along with other networking activities, and attended by members of the Japanese and German academia and industry.

In 2020, we established ETLTC - a local university association that is now taking the initiative to work with the ACM chapter and help run a full-fledged conference focused on the diverse topics in ICT for science and technology education, with an attempt to extend the networking and include participants from many other global universities and industry. The idea is to have global networking and discussion on these related topics which stand isolated in many aspects of practice but are technically, theoretically, and pedagogically related in their interdisciplinarity.