The 20th EATEL Summer School on Technology Enhanced Learning 2026 took place in Burgas, Bulgaria. The event featured a comprehensive program including inspiring keynote talks, mentoring activities, networking opportunities, and workshop presentations. The EduTec team, represented by Fabíola Gonçalves Coelho Ribeiro, Gianluca Romano, Leon Camus, and Sebastian Gombert had the opportunity to present the workshop Designing Empirical TEL Studies in Higher Education: Practical Research Insights from the CORE Project.
The workshop highlighted the design, main characteristics, challenges, lessons learned, and key findings of the Critical Online Reasoning in Higher Education (CORE) project. Through discussions based on real research experiences, participants explored how methodological decisions and research strategies can support the generation of meaningful evidence about learning processes in empirical and longitudinal studies within the field of Technology Enhanced Learning (TEL). Following an interactive and practice-oriented format, the workshop combined hands-on activities with group discussions. It provided participants with an opportunity to reflect on relevant strategies for designing longitudinal assessments in educational contexts, addressing topics such as research design, data collection, annotation, data cleaning, and educational data analysis.