Research in Digital Learning in Higher Education

Co-designing Open Access Assessment within a Virtual Transnational Multidisciplinary Collaboration

Frederic Fovet — Mon, 12 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000

This paper examines the analysis of an instructor’s process of auto-ethnographic data collection as they make their way on a reflective journey within an open pedagogy faculty fellowship. As part of this professional development process, the instructor was matched with a colleague in a different discipline on a campus overseas. The faculty pair worked virtually in a multidisciplinary dialogue to create an open assessment, aligned with a specific UNSDG, that might function in both courses, using the same directives and grading rubric. The inductive coding of this data and subsequent thematic analysis revealed four main themes: design as lack of comfort, digital professional collaborative, tapping into participatory motivation with learners, and assessing for community. The paper includes a reflection on implications for the field and suggests that assessment design may need to be reframed as a disruptive and unfamiliar process, rather than a repetition of internalized habits, if it is to remain authentic, effective, and transformative.

Digital Play as Experimental Folding

Ian Robson, Anna R L Carter, Nicola Whitton — Mon, 12 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000

We learn through all experiences, but not all learning transforms us. Play is assumed to disrupt traditional learning, focusing on digital play, we argue that disruption depends on how play folds. Drawing on Deleuzian concepts of folding, we argue that digital play creates different learning conditions than formal approaches – characterised by disruption, experimentation, and unpredictability. Folding brings unfamiliar elements – roles, constraints, responsive environments – into temporary contact with players’ existing experiences, creating magic circles. Folding creates bounded spaces where different rules apply and settled patterns are disrupted. What happens within the fold can be unfolded, with learning unpacked and carried into new contexts.

We analyse eight types of digital play – roleplay, simulations, traditional play, virtual play, hybrid play, game-making, gamification, and playfulness – and use an example of each type to imagine how folding might operate in that context. From our analysis, we highlight four different ways in which folding can disrupt and engage, by: providing delightful sensory experiences; unsettling and reconfiguring identities; expanding possibilities; and creating altered rhythms and temporalities.

Our analysis posits that transformative learning emerges from genuine folding – creating magic circles open to radical uncertainty in play – not simply from adding game mechanics to predetermined structures. Understanding the affordances of folding can enable transformative play rather than using predictable game structures to repackage digital education. The question is then whether we are open to the unconstrained whimsy and embracing of uncertainty that happens when we use play to disrupt and create genuinely transformational experiences.

Between institutional strategy and disciplinary differences

Susannah Quinsee, Martin Oliver — Mon, 12 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000

This paper explores the challenges of curriculum design in Higher Education, focusing on the difficulty of balancing disciplinary and institutional priorities.

During the pandemic, the ‘pivot’ to online teaching kept universities open, but created new problems for marginalised students and for teachers. When campuses re-opened, the rush to return to ‘normal’ also reintroducing long-established forms of prejudice and exclusion, locking in economic logics and the commodification of academic work in place of pedagogies of care. Many new practices that were normalised during the pandemic were discarded with the return to campus. Yet the landscape of higher education had changed in that time.

Recognising that both moves were problematic, we undertook a research-led, speculative programme of research. We undertook interviews exploring staff experiences of pandemic pedagogies, analysing these to create tasks for a LEGO® Serious Play® workshop imaging unrestricted possible future delivery models. This workshop identified competing priorities between participants, with disciplinary norms (e.g. for class sizes) taking precedence over institutional priorities (e.g. for efficiencies of scale). These tensions were used to generate design prompts, framing curriculum design in terms of competing priorities that must be balanced within and across course designs.

These prompts then formed the basis of a second workshop, where course teams from a range of disciplines planned the future redesign of their courses with more constraints. Rather than converging on pre-specified models or templates, the workshop provoked participants to speculate on the kinds of future they wanted to create for their courses, and how these might be accommodated within the limited resources and capacities of the institution.

We conclude by reflecting on the successes and challenges of this approach, and the value of the design prompt for use in other institutions.

More Than Memes: Recognition, Justification, and the Work of Understanding

Mon, 12 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000

This short paper emerged from a multidisciplinary collaboration investigating the use of memes in higher education across Biology, Education, Forensic Science, Mathematics, Medieval History, and Russian Studies. As colleagues compared examples from different disciplines, it became clear that the most interesting questions were not about memes themselves. Instead, the project highlighted a broader issue concerning how learners encounter meaning through digital artefacts and how moments of recognition relate to deeper disciplinary understanding. What began as a study of memes ultimately led to a wider exploration of interpretation, justification, and the work of understanding in digitally mediated learning environments.

This short paper explores how digital artefacts - including memes, diagrams, AI-generated summaries, visual explanations, and discussion formats - shape interpretation within higher education. It argues that such artefacts often make ideas recognisable before they are fully justifiable within disciplinary frameworks. Students may identify patterns, coherence, or intended meaning before they are able to explain, critique, or defend those interpretations through disciplinary reasoning.

This distinction has become increasingly significant in the context of generative AI, where fluency and coherence can easily be mistaken for understanding. Drawing on examples from practice and insights from edusemiotics, digital pedagogy, and disciplinary learning, the discussion reframes digital artefacts not as simple engagement tools but as sites of interpretive and intellectual work. The paper concludes with practical reflective questions and open-access resources designed to support colleagues in working more intentionally with digital artefacts in their own teaching.

Can phenomenology inform the experience of virtual reality?

Childs Mark — Mon, 12 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Virtual reality (VR) is typically defined as computer-generated or -assisted three-dimensional environments that create an experience of immersion, allow user-interaction and are set apart from the real world in some way. These images can be displayed on screens, projected onto walls or experienced through head-mounted displays with increasing degrees of immersion.

Accounts by users of virtual reality often fall short in their ability to describe the experience. The greater immersion and interaction that are possible within VR confer a reality to the experience which is at odds with the inherent unreality of the medium as it is set apart from physical reality.

The literature of phenomenology (that is, the philosophy of the lived experience of individuals) aims to define the building blocks of what this sense-making of the world around us is built from. The aim of this study is that by using these concepts, and rebuilding a phenomenology of the lived experience of virtual reality, it is possible to develop a language and framework for describing the essential elements of the experience of virtual reality and so enable better analyses of interacting and learning within these spaces.