Purpose This paper aims to investigate how written assessments can be redesigned to foreground human connection within generative artificial intelligence (GenAI)-enabled feedback processes, examining how relational feedback practices operate in artificial intelligence (AI)-augmented environments through two case studies in a large Australian business school.Design/methodology/approach Using an exploratory multiple-case study design, the study draws on focus groups, student surveys and teaching team feedback across two units. Data were analysed deductively through the lenses of relational pedagogy and a relational GenAI integration framework.Findings Students engaged selectively with human and GenAI feedback, combining sources according to need and confidence. Effective integration depended on relational design elements including scaffolding, emotional engagement and co-design. GenAI was most effective as a complement to human judgement within structured, relationally grounded feedback systems.Originality/value This paper provides an empirically grounded account of relational feedback practices in AI-augmented assessment and advances design-based knowledge for intentionally combining human and AI-generated feedback.

Generation Alpha, born entirely in the 21st century, is set to transform higher education through their distinct behavioural, epistemological, and technological traits. This paper critically examines how their expectation that are shaped by personalisation, digital immersion, and non-linear knowledge acquisition, challenge traditional undergraduate education models. Drawing on an informed critique literature review, the study explores the implications of Generation Alpha’s learning preferences and proposes a future-focused response through higher education learning design. The Adaptive Learning Ecosystem (ALE), developed at the University of Sydney Business School, is introduced as a model for reimagining curriculum, assessment, and student engagement. The model supports personalised, transdisciplinary, and socially connected learning, enabling students to navigate complex educational journeys with agency and purpose. The paper outlines three strategic horizons (program design, lifelong learning, and space spaces for innovation) through which higher education institutions can respond to the educational ambitions of Generation Alpha. We argue for a co-designed, human-centred approach to learning that prepares students not for today’s technologies and crises, but for the unknown and yet to be experienced challenges of tomorrow. In doing so, universities can remain relevant, resilient, and impactful in an era of continuous change.

Zines represent acts of resistance and rebellion against mainstream structures, expectations and experiences. They provide an accessible form of alternative media-making, exposing the uncertain, emotional and physical experiences that initiate journeys into liminality. This study aimed to understand how zine-makers, through forms of writing that directly addressed the reader, such as forewords and editorials, described and shared their rites of passage and their reasons for making and distributing zines, by conducting a constructivist grounded theory analysis of 70 zines collected between 2004 and 2019. Adapting the anthropological framework of liminal communitas, the study demonstrated how zine-makers navigated their resistance to the structural bounds of their inhabited community, their uncertainty and their narratological approach to discover a home within the communitas of zines. The article argues that zine-makers and readers viewed liminality as a destination, rather than a way station to more ‘normal’ social structures, which counters the established behaviours of the liminal individual.

This study explores the design of CONNECTspace, a novel teaching environment at the University of Sydney Business School, aimed at fostering and enabling connected learning at scale. Using participatory action research and cogenerative dialogue, the project addresses the challenge of creating spaces that build connections between students, staff, and disciplines. The design focuses on five key capacities: engaging with the crowd, the group, the individual and the knowledge, generating ideas, sharing work, building social connections, and creating safe spaces for success. The study highlights the importance of changing dynamics, functions, and relationships within teaching spaces to support connectivity, creativity, and effective learning. The findings offer insights for designers and educators seeking to transform traditional teaching spaces into collaborative, connected learning environments that transform both the structural and pedagogical experience of teaching at scale.

Purpose The purpose of this article is to posit an alternative learning design approach to the technology-led magnification and multiplication of learning and to the linearity of curricular design approaches such as a constructive alignment. Learning design ecosystem thinking creates complex and interactive networks of activity that engage the widest span of the community in addressing critical pedagogical challenges. They identify the pinch-points where negative engagements become structured into the student experience and design pathways for students to navigate their way through the uncertainty and transitions of higher education at-scale. Design/methodology/approach It is a conceptual paper drawing on a deep and critical engagement of literature, a reflexive approach to the dominant paradigms and informed by practice. Findings Learning design ecosystems create spaces within at-scale education for deep learning to occur. They are not easy to design or maintain. They are epistemically and pedagogically complex, especially when deployed within the structures of an institution. As Gough (2013) argues, complexity reduction should not be the sole purpose of designing an educational experience and the transitional journey into and through complexity that students studying in these ecosystems take can engender them with resonant, deeply human and transdisciplinary graduate capabilities that will shape their career journey. Research limitations/implications The paper is theoretical in nature (although underpinned by rigorous evaluation of practice). There are limitations in scope in part defined by the amorphous definitions of scale. It is also limited to the contexts of higher education although it is not bound to them. Originality/value This paper challenges the dialectic that argues for a complexity reduction in higher education and posits the benefits of complexity, connection and transition in the design and delivery of education at-scale.

In this panel, we share insights from LSE100 (London School of Economics) and Leading in a Post-Crisis World (University of Sydney Business School). These multidisciplinary programs engage students in collaborative problem-solving across diverse backgrounds and skill sets. Our challenge lies in integrating these varied perspectives into a cohesive classroom experience. To address this, we employ digitally enhanced practices, including media-rich course materials and a flipped lecture structure. These approaches connect students across disciplines, allowing them to select content relevant to their learning goals. Additionally, we explore video and digital storytelling as assessment tools, fostering student confidence in emerging technologies. Attendees will witness embedded video technology examples and receive basic training for digital storytelling using accessible tools like smartphones. We argue that these tools can be used by a variety of educators and will demonstrate easy ways to bring them into a program of study.

This highly interactive and provocative hypothetical-style panel discussion will take the audience on a collective journey through the complexity and challenges of strategically designing and delivering online learning in a post-digital, post-crisis new normal. The aim of the panel is to collectively shift the dial on how we understand, articulate, and develop the benefit of learning design to the institution, how others have been extremely successful in doing that (and what can we learn from them) and how we are collectively struggling with precarious contracts, budgets, de-professionalisation and constantly shifting priorities as we return to a campus-based teaching and learning experience. Drawing on the principles of hyperreality, participants will become part of the community of a hypothetical university. Through highly interactive and immersive scenarios the panel session will collectively traverse the transitional, uncertain spaces of a post-crisis university and design for an educational future that learns from the relationships between people and technology to make teaching and learning better.

Participation in zine-making is enacted through a series of inter-linked making practices and intentions, constructed within both personal and interpersonal frames, and shared with others in different ways. Zines are catalysts for network formation within a cultural or sub-cultural community, with zine-makers sharing experiences, resources, and creativity to inform and associate with the community. Drawing on the constructivist grounded theory analysis of thirty-four semi-structured email interviews with zine-makers, this study sought to theorize a transdisciplinary understanding of the potential role zine-making communities play in the decision by an individual to participate in zine-making and how that participation was defined, enacted, and enculturated through zine-making. Using a constructivist grounded analysis, a model of participation was developed that defined and explored the bounded boundaryless of the zine-making communitas. In these spaces, members of the communitas deliberately transitioned into or through liminality and found affiliation and communion through engaging in and sharing the processes involved in zine-making (such as construction, distribution, and writing). Within this semi-fragile zine-making community, smaller sub-spaces were formed through engagement or affiliation with different interpretations and enactions of these processes, manifest in the production of different zine typologies and the creation and engagement with readership or circulation networks.

Designing strategic pedagogical change through the lens of a student experience that is yet to be experienced offers a critical frame for embedding the impacts of transition, uncertainty, belonging and the complexity of the student journey into the co-design of teaching and learning. A digital storytelling approach extends the notion of the student experience beyond the singular and metricised descriptions common in online student satisfaction survey instruments into a rhizomatic, resonant living community that resides in the intersecting spaces of work, life, play and learning. This paper describes an ethnographic-like model of collecting and evaluating the student experience through a semi-structured digital storytelling methodology that supports both co-design and cogenerative dialogue as a form of curriculum enhancement. The paper outlines how the Student Experience Digital Storytelling model was iteratively designed, deployed, and then evaluated through participatory action research-informed case studies at the University of Sydney Business School (Australia) and the London School of Economics and Political Science (United Kingdom) that embedded the student experience into the co-design of curriculum and assessment interventions.

The didactic lecture is a well-established but contentious practice in higher education. It is an essentially mono-directional experience delivered in purposefully designed spaces that entrench modes of learning and expected behaviours by both staff and students. This paper will challenge the ongoing primacy of the didactic lecture in higher education and posit a dialogical alternative that supports students to interact and connect at scale through the creation of social spaces. A case study of a program at the University of Sydney Business School will interrogate the role of technology in simulating an immersive hyperreality for students in large-group teaching settings that blurs the boundaries of disciplinary knowledge and the abstractions and realties of their work, life, play and learning.

A significant majority of universities have engaged in piloting or implementing technology enabled forms of examination (online exams) in response to increasing pressures on space, resources and the demands of scale. Informed by analysis drawn from a series of consultative workshops and interviews with over 120 participants including academics, support and professional services staff and senior management at the University of Sydney, this paper will explore the tensions and challenges arising from the institutional demand to determine the requirements for the procurement of a single online exam system to replace the current spread of disparate pilots across the faculties. Using pain points, alleviations and mitigations that are felt within the existing exam system, we will identify two tensions that increase in importance the further any system moves away from the dominant models of exam facilitation and marking using technology.

Learning through making has emerged as a critical form of pedagogy in the digital era of higher education, supporting active learning, students as co-creators and co-designers of their own learning and accessible forms of experiential education. Much of the existing literature and practice in making focuses on how to embed maker pedagogy within STEM fields and arts and media practice. This paper will explore the unique nature of making in social science education and role of technology rich spaces that were designed and deployed at the London School of Economics and Political Science in the United Kingdom played in supporting students to engage in social science making connected to assessment, teaching and as ways of navigating their own pathways through and inside their own village of learning spaces.

Using Mathematics to Understand the World: How Culture Promotes Children's Mathematics offers fundamental insight into how mathematics permeates our lives as a way of representing and thinking about the world. Internationally renowned experts Terezinha Nunes and Peter Bryant examine research into children's mathematical development to show why it is important to distinguish between quantities, relations and numbers. Using Mathematics to Understand the World presents a theory about the development of children's quantitative reasoning and reveals why and how teaching about quantitative reasoning can be used to improve children's mathematical attainment in school. It describes how learning about the analytical meaning of numbers is established as part of mathematics at school but quantitative reasoning is emphasized less even though it is increasingly acclaimed as essential for thinking mathematically and for using mathematics to understand the world. This essential text is for all students of mathematics education, developmental psychology and cognitive psychology. By including activities for parents and professionals to try themselves, it may help you to recognize your own quantitative reasoning.

The move to online learning has blurred the distinction between the Foucauldian conceptualisation of university as a 'Heterotopia' with the real world of contingent alternative learning spaces students create. In this paper, we highlight the need for a broader and more holistic approach to educational design which requires a re-conceptualisation of the learning environment to include the students' real-world spaces and their socio-cultural surroundings through a postdigital paradigm. We seek to understand how Covid-19 has accelerated postdigital disruption of the concept of university as heterotopia, where learning is traditionally highly structured and segmented in slices of time for seminars, lectures, and workshops. In April 2020, the University of Sydney Business School invited students to share stories of their remote learning experience using the #OurPlace2020 hashtag. Using Actor Network Theory (ANT), we analyse 37 digital stories to provide examples of how the boundaries of the traditional learning spaces of university campus are blurred with real-life learning spaces when students are studying remotely. We argue for the need to adopt a broader analytical approach that can elucidate the complexity of heterogenous networks of interacting digital and non-digital entities through which learning spaces are constructed.

In March 2020 I published the 'emergency editorial' in Postdigital Science and Education and invited the community to 'explore all imaginable aspects of this large social experiment that the Covid-19 pandemic has lain down in front of us' (Jandrić 2020a: 237).Articles immediately started pouring in; within weeks, the journal's contributions had been recognized by institutions such as the World Health Organization, the US National Library of Medicine's Nature Public Health Emergency Collection, and UNESCO (see Jandrić 2021 for details).After publication of the October 2020 issue of Postdigital Science and Education, 1 consisting of almost 60 articles on the Covid-19 pandemic, the first wave of pandemic research has wound down.As it has become obvious that Covid-19 is here to stay, research on immediate Covid-19 experiences and responses slowly gives way to research which 'reaches beyond the pandemic to the point where the pandemic experience is transformed from an object of research to an intrinsic part of our theories, approaches, research methodologies, and social struggles' (Jandrić 2021: 262).An important part of our early efforts to make sense of the pandemic, and the one very close to my heart, is 'Teaching in the Age of Covid-19' (Jandrić et al. 2020), which is a collection of short testimonies and workspace photographs submitted between 18 March and 5 May 2020.