Dr Nick Kelly

I was part of a team working on a piece back in 2021 about faster feedback in higher education. The title of the piece is Towards faster feedback in higher education through digitally mediated dialogic loops (Willis et al., 2021)

The motivating observation was that units tend to run across a semester (say, 13 weeks) and only after all of the teaching is completed is there any feedback from students.

The insight that my colleagues, Jill Willis and Andrew Gibson, had is that we want to have faster feedback loops, from week to week.

Andrew developed some software to aid university lecturers/professors in facilitating that because he’s a clever kind of guy: https://goingok.org/

It was used at our university (QUT in Australia) with students and then the data analysed, resulting in a paper. A key extract from the abstract is:

The findings identify and theorise four types of digitally mediated feedback loops: students in computer-mediated dialogue with themselves; students and teachers in dialogue with each other; the reflection on how feedback informed learning; and the sociotechnical dialogue informing ongoing technical design. Three design dilemmas that were experienced by teachers as they enacted digitally mediated dialogic feedback loops are articulated, alongside the principles that enabled responsive design. Understanding these design elements is fundamental if automation of some parts of the feedback loop through reflective writing analytics is to be considered both feasible and desirable.

I thought it was one of the more thoughtful papers that I’ve ever been involved in, but it received little attention, hence this belated post.

The identification of four feedback loops seems particularly useful:

1. students in computer-mediated dialogue with themselves
2. students and teachers in dialogue with each other
3. the reflection on how feedback informed learning
4. the sociotechnical dialogue informing ongoing technical design

My future work is going to look at the intersection of this space and the kind of understanding of learning design that we write about here (Kickbusch et al., 2025).

References

1. Kickbusch, S., Kelly, N., & Huijser, H. (2025). Framing the core expertise of learning designers through strong concepts. Higher Education, 1-18. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10734-025-01514-z
2. Willis, J., Gibson, A., Kelly, N., Spina, N., Azordegan, J., & Crosswell, L. (2021). Towards faster feedback in higher education through digitally mediated dialogic loops. Australasian Journal of Educational Technology, 37(3), 22-37. https://doi.org/10.14742/ajet.5977

What is the expertise of a learning designer in higher education?

This is the topic of a new paper led by Steven Kickbusch (with Nick Kelly and Henk Huijser).

I am biased… but I really like the approach of defining expertise through a set of strong concepts that can connect theory to practice (Kickbusch et al., 2025):

I want to quote from the conclusion here as it’s useful for anyone theorising the value of learning designers and thinking about what designers need to learn and how they should be managed within a university:

The establishment of a clear set of core competencies has significant implications for the profession. Firstly, it empowers learning designers to articulate and advocate for their value as design professionals, distinguishing their roles from those of mere technicians. This recognition is crucial for ensuring that learning designers are seen as integral to the educational process, capable of making substantial contributions to the design and implementation of learning experiences. Secondly, it provides a foundation for developing educational pathways and qualifications for learning designers, ensuring that these programs accurately reflect the profession’s true nature. By aligning professional preparation and qualifications with the core competencies of learning design, we can better prepare future professionals for the demands of the field. (Kickbusch et al., 2025)

The work follows on from the PhD of Steven Kickbusch which is valuable reading for anyone who has an interest in this work and wants to go deeper: https://eprints.qut.edu.au/235922/

References

Kickbusch, Steven (2022) How learning designers work with teachers. PhD by Publication, Queensland University of Technology.

Kickbusch, S., Kelly, N., & Huijser, H. (2025). Framing the core expertise of learning designers through strong concepts. Higher Education, 1-18. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10734-025-01514-z

I truly love this paper which describes an approach to co-designing new Internet of Things devices and interactions (Berger et al., 2019). It brings together a few things that I think embody timeless approaches to designing:

1. They abstracted the essence of the design space into two dice, one for sensors and one for actuators.
2. They used a set of cards to help create different design scenarios.
3. The used prompts for the participants to say what kind of interaction they were trying to create.

All of this led to some great examples of novel designs, three of which are included in the paper. Inspiring stuff.

References

Berger, A., Odom, W., Storz, M., Bischof, A., Kurze, A., & Hornecker, E. (2019, May). The inflatable cat: Idiosyncratic ideation of smart objects for the home. In Proceedings of the 2019 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (pp. 1-12).

I’ve recently published a paper with my colleagues Claire Brophy, Lisa Scharoun, Melanie Finger, and Deanna Meth. The aim of the paper is to suggest that when universities are designing professional development for their staff (whether about policy, learning and teaching, research, compliance or anything else) there are three recognisable approaches:

1. Help-yourself portals, like a website or set of videos where you access the learning yourself.
2. Drive-by workshops, where you attend a one hour-ish talk from someone about what you need to know (from an implicit transmission of knowledge standpoint).
3. Co-design of knowledge with staff, where staff are actively involved in creating the knowledge and bring their own experiences into the learning.

Each has its place but co-design is often neglected.

The paper concludes with these guidelines for how to use co-design for professional develoment:

Guidance for professional learning through co-design

Professional learning in universities here is conceived of as existing in a broad range of circumstances, from new policies to new processes to new paradigms and across the scope of academic, professional, and executive staff. A case study in the context of (staff) learning about designing for transdisciplinary learning experiences (for students) has provided an example of co-design for professional learning in practice. This final section aims to share heuristics about the use of co-design within professional learning and can be considered as partial responses to the questions: Should I use co-design here? How do I use co-design? Is it really co-design? (Moll et al., 2020).

These heuristics are:

1. For co-design to be authentic it requires that the problems being addressed are of significance to those taking part in the co-design. In our example the academics involved had expressed interest in addressing the challenge of creating new transdisciplinary learning experiences for the institution-wide development.
2. Those facilitating co-design need to be experienced design facilitators to overcome common pitfalls, such as overcoming participant reticence to engage and the need for time management. The professionalism of design facilitation is poorly understood by those who lack these skills (Evans et al., 2021; Mosely et al., 2021).
3. There are circumstances where other approaches of help-yourself platforms or drive-by workshops are more appropriate. The benefit of using co-design over these approaches is that learning happens whilst simultaneously meeting the basic needs of staff: valuing their competency, permitting their autonomy, and creating connections through authentic, shared problem solving.
4. Co-design is only authentic (rather than performative) if the power to co-generate knowledge is shared within the space and has meaning to the organisation outside of that space.
5. Co-design takes time. Knowledge that could be disseminated through a drive-by workshop would (by our estimate, based on experience) take at least three times as long to share through an authentic co-design process.
6. Co-design is situational. There is no cookie-cutter template for how to run a co-design session. Extant kits for running design thinking workshops are no substitute for planning a co-design session to suit the specific learning circumstances. The idea of designing a co-design session through consideration of set design, social design, epistemic design, and design for co-configuration can be a useful way to approach a particular situation.

Professional identity and trust as significant factors in designing PD

This suggestion for co-design as PD fits well with recent analysis of the types of PD that staff at a regional university consider to be successful (Herbert et al., 2023). The authors found that PD was more likely to be successful when it considered the professional identity of the staff involved and when it involved placing trust in those staff.

This fits well with the case for an increase in the amount of co-design for professional learning in universities. I do wish that our university leaders would read this kind of research and use approaches that involve trust and recognition of staff expertise more frequently!

Obviously only when appropriate as it does take more time and resources but too often such approaches are not even on the radar.

References

• Herbert, K., van der Laan, L. & Danaher, P. A. (2023) Towards an Australian regional university professional development typology: a qualitative exploration of the academic voice, International Journal for Academic Development, DOI: 10.1080/1360144X.2023.2242816
• Kelly, N., Brophy, C., Scharoun, L., Finger, M., & Meth, D. (2023). Co-design for staff professional learning within universities: a case study. Journal of Applied Research in Higher Education. https://doi.org/10.1108/JARHE-12-2022-0381
• Moll, S., Wyndham-West, M., Mulvale, G., Park, S., Buettgen, A., Phoenix, M., Fleisig, R. and Bruce, E. (2020), “Are you really doing ’codesign’? Critical reflections when working with vulnerable populations”, BMJ Open, British Medical Journal Publishing Group, Vol. 10 No. 11, e038339, doi: 10.1136/bmjopen-2020-038339.