EATEL has lost its Vice-President

The European Association of Technology EnhancedLearning (EATEL) is deeply grieved to announce that its Vice-President, Prof. Dr. Martin Wolpers, passed away suddenly and unexpectedly on February 25, 2016. Martin is survived by his wife and his two children.

Many of us remember Martin not only as the Vice-President of our association but also as an open-hearted friend, a trusted and reliable colleague, an excellent scientist and an exceptional organiser. He often called himself the “Helping Hand”. While working for the L3S research lab in Hannover, Germany and in his capacity of administrative coordinator of the EU-funded PROLEARN Network of Excellence, he was the driving force behind the creation of EATEL in 2007 and its associated events like the European Conference on Technology Enhanced Learning, the JTEL Summer Schools and the Professional Learning Facts. Later he joined KU Leuven as a professor and the Fraunhofer Institute of Applied Information Technology (FIT) as the leader of the technology enhanced learning group where he continued to coordinate big EU-funded projects like ROLE and MACE.

Martin had great ideas and plans for developing the association in the future and this separation from our Helping-Hand is an enormous loss to us. We will make it our duty to keep his heritage alive in EATEL. Our thoughts and feelings at the current time go to his family.

Katherine Maillet, EATEL President
Fridolin Wild, EATEL Treasurer
Ralf Klamma, EATEL SIG Leader