11th International Conference on Smart Learning Ecosystem and Regional Development
2026: AI enhanced learning as bridge toward future jobs and a better society
22nd-23rd of June (on-line)
After a first tour of Europe Timisoara (East), Aveiro (West) and Aalborg (North), Rome (South), two virtual editions – SLERD 2020 and SLERD 2021 – the second tour of Europe led us first in Bucharest (SLERD 2022), in Tallinn (SLERD 2023), in Troyes (SLERD 2024). and finally in Craiova (on-line format SLERD 2025), in 2026 the eleventh edition will be organized again in a fully on-line format by the ASLERD and University of Strathclyde, see the call for papers.
Building on a decade of dialogue and innovation, SLERD 2026 invites academics, practitioners and policy makers to stimulate a critical debate and explore how artificial intelligence can practically and ethically augment learning ecosystems, linking classrooms, workplaces, and communities to foster human flourishing.
With the theme “AI-enhanced learning as a bridge toward future jobs and a better society”, the conference emphasizes the overarching nature of AI-supported smart learning ecosystems focusing on aligning technological advances with inclusive pedagogies, ethical AI use, professional upskilling, equitable access, regional development, and responsible governance.
The 11th edition is both a milestone of our evolving community and a call to action. We aim to surface actionable models and design principles that help institutions, regions, and industries create adaptive, trustworthy, and human-cantered learning ecosystems that prepare people not just for the next job, but for meaningful participation in society.
More in general SLERD 2026, as for the past editions, welcomes researchers and practitioners from all over the world involved in the development of Smart Learning Ecosystems and Smart Education, as engines of social innovation and territorial development.At the core, the adjective smart comprises terms like intelligent, purpose oriented, supportive, artful, clever and the like. Thus, smart does not necessarily include the usage of technology (neither does it exclude technology!).
Smart referred to learning ecosystems in ASLERD and SLERD contexts, thus, does not simply mean “technology enhanced” (to include expert systems or AI). The smartness is a more complex multilayered construct related to the wellbeing of the players operating in the ecosystems, that hopefully are also in relation with the territory (see Declaration of Timisoara and its updated version Declaration of Troyes or Timisoara 2.0; the proceedings of the previous SLERD conferences published by Springer (Aveiro, Aalborg, Rome , SLERD2020, SLERD2021, SLERD 2022 on-line and SLERD 2023) and the special issues (N.16, N.17, N.20, N.27, N.31, N.35, N.39, N.43, N.47, N.51, N.55, N.60 and N.62) devoted to SLERD by IxD&A journal). Smartness is affected by the improvement of any relevant aspects of the learning processes and ecosystem functioning, especially if connected with territorial development and social innovation.
Technologies are mediators. Hopefully they should be included but they are not a “sine qua non”.
The achievement of the learning ecosystems’ smartness is a process that needs a long term vision, multidisciplinary competences, an attitude to understand people and contexts and to mediate point of views, a dynamic resilience to keep on track to achieve, step by step, the foreseen goals: in short a design literacy from which to make emerge projects and processes capable to reify them, all aimed at achieving a people centered smart education, social innovation and territorial development.
Watch the video on the Youtube ASLERD channel