Towards sustainable technology-enhanced innovation in higher education: Advancing learning design by understanding and supporting teacher design practice

Improving teacher design promises to be a scalable, sustainable approach to building

capacity amongst a workforce faced with complex and evolving drivers of change in

higher education worldwide. While design has long been recognised as a routine part of

teaching, there has been renewed interest in supporting and understanding the design

work that teachers do to foster innovation, particularly in technology-enhanced

learning, at institutional scale by influencing teachers’ practices. Re-framing teaching

as design usefully emphasises the creative problem-solving needed to balance

pedagogical, logistical and technical considerations within specific educational

contexts, tailored to learners’ needs. There is potential for this re-framing to build on

and advance work in “learning design” and “design for learning” that has generated a

wide range of practical supports and tools. In this article, we explore, problematise and

conceptualise the notion of “teacher as designer” within the complexity of contemporary

higher education through a critical review of existing empirical and conceptual work

internationally. We offer insights into the current state of knowledge about teacher

design in higher education, highlight gaps and possibilities, offer a new conceptualisation

drawing on practice theory and set out propositions to provoke further debate about

teacher design as a vehicle for sustainable innovation in higher education.