Sandris Zeivots

@sandrisz.bsky.social

202 Followers 766 Following

Designing meaningful practices to learn and engage | Senior Lecturer @Sydney_Uni | Meaningful engagement | Co-design | Experiential learning | Learning spaces

Title: Assessment design through co-design: reimagining assessment design practices in higher education Abstract: Abstract Assessment design in higher education is often approached with a focus on assessment tasks and the processes of designing them, with instructors making decisions in isolation. Drawing on assessment design, co-design and practice theory as a conceptual framing, we recast assessment design as a relational, situated practice and examine co-design as a way to come to practise assessment differently. In a business school, 102 stakeholders participated across three courses through four interconnected interventions: Connect:In workshops, weekly student reflections, academic capacity-building workshops and student testimonial videos. Using practitioner inquiry and the Theory of Practice Architectures, we analysed how sayings, doings and relatings shaped changes to assessment practices. Co-design produced more inclusive and relational assessment practices, strengthened instructor design literacies, surfaced students’ lived experiences and agency, and supported shared ownership of design choices. This led to changes to assessment practice within the courses. Challenges centred on time, role clarity and negotiating divergent views, yet structured facilitation and distributed responsibilities enabled progress. The article offers three provocations that serve as implications for practice: (1) reposition assessment design as an ongoing educational practice; (2) embed relationality and distributed responsibility into assessment design and (3) institutionalise assessment design as a supported and shared professional practice.
Active Learning in Higher Education: Inheriting Pasts and Emerging Futures. Authors: Kristin Børte and Sandris Zeivots. Abstract: This paper examines active learning from a temporal perspective, reflecting on its historical influences, trajectories and future directions emerging in research. Rather than treating active learning as a fixed pedagogical approach, the paper situates it within longer educational traditions and ongoing debates about teaching and learning. Drawing on research in higher education, the paper discusses how active learning has been shaped by changing ontologies, relationships and understandings of activity and student participation. The paper concludes by identifying three interrelated matters of concern for future research on active learning: the conceptualisation of purposeful activity beyond mere “being active,” questions of agency and authorship and human–AI entanglements, and the need for critically curious approaches to imagining and designing futures of active learning.
Review of Michael A. Peters, Benjamin J. Green, Olivera Kamenarac, Petar Jandrić, and Tina Besley (2025). The Geopolitics of Postdigital Educational Development By Sandris Zeivots A Book (and Postdigital Geopolitics) to Sit With I read The Geopolitics of Postdigital Educational Development (Peters et al. 2025a) on an e-ink digital notebook. Two older practices, reading and note-taking, were digitised and made to feel almost indistinguishable from paper. Highlighting resembled marking student work. An eraser became less about rationale and more about the affordability of the technology, in an oddly intimate way, as if interacting with paper. The gestures with technology felt familiar, despite the changed medium. That experience is inseparable from the book’s argument. It illustrates what postdigital researchers describe as a blurring of practices, where familiar habits persist and merge with new technologies, even as the material conditions around them change (Jandrić et al. 2018). There is something quite daring about opening an edited scholarly collection where the first lines refer to living in times when we have trouble finding ‘enough good reading time’ (Peters et al. 2025a, b, c: v) (emphases in original). Rather than treating this as an individual issue of time management, the book situates it within the postdigital condition, where digital technologies are entangled with educational work, institutional expectations to work hard, and everyday scholarly practice (Jandrić 2022). Crucially, the Series Editor’s Preface resists the temptation to isolate technology as the next big cause, noting instead that ‘it is never only about the technology’ (Lamb 2025: vi), and that what happens within and beyond education is contingent on broader social, economic, political, and environmental forces. I took time to sit with the book, and, equally, to sit with postdigital geopolitics.
𝐄𝐱𝐩𝐞𝐜𝐭𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧𝐬 𝐯𝐬 𝐫𝐞𝐚𝐥𝐢𝐭𝐲 𝐚𝐛𝐨𝐮𝐭 𝐀𝐈 ● 3 key uses of AI: (1) Personal productivity (‘me’ thing); (2) Process productivity (‘we’ thing); (3) Paradigm productivity (new ways of doing). Most current AI use sits in step one (Ray Fleming) ● Complexity in balancing students use of AI, incl those refusing to use it, with educator assumptions about student AI literacy (Danielle Ramirez) ● Teachers are not getting timely feedback on their teaching. A prototype AI tool, grounded in instructor-recorded class transcripts, offers structured feedback on: Keep doing; Experiment with; Say this; What to watch for (Dan Levy) 𝐈𝐬 𝐢𝐭 𝐀𝐈 𝐭𝐨 𝐛𝐥𝐚𝐦𝐞? ● Headlines focus on job cuts ‘caused by AI’. But did AI actually take the jobs or was the employer ‘AI washing’ (AI blamed for business choices, organisational change)? (Ray Fleming) ● University systems are short-term and rarely reward systemic collaboration. A small number of units actually innovate within organisations, even where innovation is expected. Implications for AI integration (Kellie Charles)
Title: Walking the tightrope of quality assessment: Balancing perspectives and priorities of stakeholder groups ABSTRACT: The ongoing evolution of digital technologies, particularly Generative Artificial Intelligence, continues to shape and challenge assessment design in higher education. Given the complex and sometimes competing factors that contribute to assessment design, and the evolving digital landscape in which assessment is placed, this study examines the perspectives and priorities of five key stakeholder groups – educators, students, employers of graduates, accrediting bodies, and institutional policy-makers – regarding the defining characteristics of quality assessment. Using a mixed-methods approach, we conducted interviews, focus groups, and a national survey to extend a framework for designing quality digital assessments in business education that was originally developed using educator perspectives only. The findings highlight the importance of balancing academic integrity, feedback quality, student experience, and authenticity in assessment design to address stakeholder perspectives. They also extend the framework by including two additional design elements: purpose and technology, and by emphasising the value of dialogue about contrasting interpretations of assessment quality. The study provides a refined framework that incorporates nuanced differences in stakeholder priorities, supports educators in designing digital assessments that respond to stakeholder needs, and encourages co-design and shared accountability. Keywords: Digital assessment, business education, assessment design, Generative Artificial Intelligence, higher education.
Title: Reshaping Higher Education Designs and Futures: Postdigital Co-design with Generative Artificial Intelligence Published in Postdigital Science and Education Authors: Sandris Zeivots, Alison Casey, Tiffany Winchester, Jack Webster, Xin Wang, Linus Tan, Wina Smeenk, Frank P. Schulte, Antonia Scholkmann, Belinda Paulovich, Diego Muñoz, Joanne Mignone, Lilia Mantai, Stefan Hrastinski, Rebecca Godwin, Olov Engwall, Henrik Dindas, Marieke van Dijk, Laura Ann Chubb, Chrysi Rapanta, Jimmy Jaldemark & Sarah Hayes Abstract: This article examines how collaborative design practices in higher education are reshaped through postdigital entanglement with generative artificial intelligence (GenAI). We collectively explore how co-design, an inclusive, iterative, and relational approach to educational design and transformation, expands in meaning, practice, and ontology when GenAI is approached as a collaborator. The article brings together 19 authors and three open reviewers to engage with postdigital inquiry, structured in three parts: (1) a review of literature on co-design, GenAI, and postdigital theory; (2) 11 situated contributions from educators, researchers, and designers worldwide, each offering practice-based accounts of co-design with GenAI; and (3) an explorative discussion of implications for higher education designs and futures. Across these sections, we show how GenAI unsettles assumptions of collaboration, knowing, and agency, foregrounding co-design as a site of ongoing material, ethical, and epistemic negotiation. We argue that postdigital co-design with GenAI reframes educational design as a collective practice of imagining, contesting, and shaping futures that extend beyond human knowing.
Article title: Sensing Ethics in Postdigital Future Classrooms Abstract In this paper, we introduce and develop the concept of ‘sensing ethics’ as a relational approach to thinking about postdigital future classrooms that is informed by our material realities, social and institutional structures, and our responsibilities as educators towards our students. A postdigital lens on ethics emphasises the importance of relationships and interconnectedness in ethical decision-making, moving away from a focus on individual autonomy. It considers how actions afect relationships between humans and non-humans. This perspective moves beyond rule-based ethics, and towards an approach that is more relational, situated, and decentralised. We explore sensing ethics through three examples drawing on the theory of practice architectures. We analyse these examples through the entangled ‘doings’, ‘sayings’, and ‘relatings’ to unpack the complexities emerging in how educators and students enact sensing ethics and how ethics materialises in their human and non-human relationships. Sensing ethics does not require a fxed defnition or defnitive solutions; rather, it is a proactive and intentional practice situated in the present that shapes the near future of postdigital future classrooms.
𝐆𝐞𝐧 𝐀𝐈: 𝐰𝐡𝐚𝐭 𝐚𝐫𝐞 𝐰𝐞 𝐚𝐜𝐭𝐮𝐚𝐥𝐥𝐲 𝐭𝐚𝐥𝐤𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐚𝐛𝐨𝐮𝐭? ● Gen AI is framed in different ways. For some, it’s ‘just a tool’, an ‘active learning partner’, for others, something much bigger, messier. Some suggest one chatbot should do it all, others argue for multiple chatbots for different tasks. Some focus on text prompts, others ask AI to describe images to understand how it ‘thinks’ (Cory Dal Ponte, Anastasia Globa) ● Some use Gen AI ‘just like google’, missing out on its potential as a dialogic tool. Slowly changing, it shows the importance of prompting – now as crucial as reading and writing. Some interesting prompting models out there, e.g. ROSE (Role, objective, style, exemplar) (Dr. Kelsey Burton, Jeremy Lindeck) ● Engagement with Gen AI is emotional. Frustration when it doesn’t ‘give me exactly what I want’. Gen AI increasingly slows and paces interactions. Guiding students can build confidence ● The gap in how we learn about Gen AI is widening. Students are more open to exploring it, while some educators remain hesitant. Meanwhile, many students are unsure how to use Gen AI in class, but actively use it outside. (Jeremy Lindeck)