Design For Learning: Transforming higher education learning and teaching practice in response to rapid changes

This Symposium showcases how design-led approaches can address the complex pedagogical challenges confronting higher education in an era of rapid global change—including the COVID19 pandemic and the accelerating use of generative artificial intelligence in learning and assessment. Positioning teaching and learning as a design science offers a pragmatic and rigorous way to respond to these challenges by generating innovations that are transferable, research-informed, and adaptable across diverse educational contexts.

The Symposium will explore collaborative, research-based design methodologies such as Design Based Research, Educational Design Research, Design Thinking, and Action Research. These approaches bring students, teachers, learning designers, and educational researchers together from the earliest stages of problem identification through iterative cycles of design, implementation, and evaluation. Such methods embrace the “messy” and fast changing realities of contemporary higher education.

Aligned with the University of Melbourne’s Framework for Educational Excellence, the Symposium highlights how design-led methodologies can be strengthened by connecting these seven dimensions to design-oriented pedagogical research. The Symposium illustrates how systematic, inquiry driven innovation can advance both theory and practice while supporting high quality, future-ready education at scale.

For more information and to register, click here.