Tomorrow's professionals will require an enhanced capacity for collaboration, cooperation and creative thinking. Markauskaite and Goodyear (Markauskaite, L., and P. Goodyear. 2016. "Epistemic Fluency and Professional Education: Innovation, Knowledgeable Action and Actionable Knowledge". Springer) have posited "epistemic…

Studio, a breeding ground for curiosity and wonder, has become more of a confined space for innovation lately. Infrastructure shortage also has triggered a somewhat impersonal attitude to studio learning. Can Design-Activism mitigate such stresses on the studio by becoming an alternative mode of driving studio processes? Reflectively, this study…

In design, aspirations of 'development' and 'innovation' are now scrutinised to redress persistent market-led practice. Socially and environmentally responsive pedagogies can shift students' mindsets to consider the impacts of design practices on the planet's complex systems and societies. At the Queensland University of Technology, Australia,…

This paper offers a critical and theoretical exploration of the contemporary use of standards in assessment in higher education. It outlines three discourses of assessment standards. Each perspective foregrounds particular realities and backgrounds others, and so influences practice in particular taken-for-granted ways. The assumptions of these…

Cultivating a sense of belonging can be challenging in online contexts as well as for underrepresented students in engineering education. This study used a mixed methods sequential explanatory design to understand underrepresented students' experiences in a Canadian first-year course. Taking place during remote delivery due to COVID-19, we…

In this Point of Departure, we will present six key concepts, grouped into the following three dimensions which are salient for incorporating a cyberfeminist perspective into online higher education: Critical technologies (Platform capitalism and Digital gender gaps), Gendered gazes (Digital gender-based violence and Safer spaces) and…

For Academic Literacies, the world is textually mediated; written texts and what informs them reveal elements such as subject-discipline practices. Furthermore, multi-modalities, for example, visual representation, inform written text, and multiple methods of inquiry, including interviews, shed light on written text production. In this article we…

While attempting to develop authentic, practice-led inquiries into identity, queer students face unique issues. They often need to consider questions of community and frequently find themselves with one foot outside of the academic environment. Many also have to carefully consider the implications of declaration, and the management of trust. This…

This article initially demonstrates the parallels between the learner-centered approach in education and the user-centered approach in design disciplines. Afterward, a course on human factors that applies learner-centered methods to teach user-centered design is introduced. The focus is on three tasks to identify the application of theoretical and…

The notion of student-centred learning is often not defined; within the pedagogic literature it is generally associated with constructivism or principles associated with a constructivist environment such as building on prior knowledge, purposeful active learning and sense-making. An informal enquiry into conceptions of university staff prior to…

To examine the differences between feedback practices in liberal arts courses and in design courses, we surveyed 373 students with experiences of both. Our study found that students perceived the feedback they received in design courses as more effective in advancing their learning, and that the emotional effects of feedback presented verbally and…

This paper is based on an empirical study of assessment practices currently being undertaken in a post-1992 university in the UK. Our broad interest is in examining assessment practices in context in order to explore why lecturers assess in the ways that they do. The Assessment Environments and Cultures project aims to illuminate some of the…

This paper explores the dynamics surrounding the formation of academic identities in a context where the nature of academic work is contested both as a result of tensions within the discipline and in response to pressure from both the institution and the field of higher education. It is based on a case study which investigated the process of…