Masterclass
Meet our masterclass speakers
TransformED 2026 offers a series of masterclasses featuring renowned experts who will lead deep-dive sessions on the most pressing issues shaping academic practice.
Rethinking the Value Proposition of Human-Centred Activity in Higher Education Assessment
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is no longer a distant prospect; it is rapidly becoming embedded in the fabric of everyday life, much like the smartphone revolution of the past decade. For higher education globally, this reality presents both profound challenges and transformative opportunities in the assessment space. As educators, we cannot afford to ignore AI’s presence nor allow its adoption to occur as an uncontrolled force within our learning and teaching environments. This masterclass argues for a deliberate, values-driven approach to integrating AI into assessment practices – one that places human-centred activity at its core. It proposes a human-centred framework that draws together ideas of assemblage thinking, multimodality, and generative practice structures to foreground new pragmatic regimes for engaging with what matters in human-centred assessment work.
The session invites participants to engage with practical scenarios that illustrate how AI can be integrated into assessment designs to enhance human capacity and capability – such as supporting formative feedback processes – while preserving the relational, interpretive, ethical, and reflective dimensions that define meaningful assessment. Ultimately, the session challenges participants to reframe the value proposition of assessment from a narrow focus on efficiency to a broader commitment to engagement, trust, and authentic learning. Participants are supported to consider how they can adopt practice designs that safeguard human judgment, authenticity, and agency for AI-enabled futures. The goal is not to resist technological change, but to ensure that human-centred principles remain the differentiator in creating transformative educational experiences.
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Many Routes, With One Shared Goal: Exploring the Mechanisms to Support Students as Partners
Over the past decade, students as partners (SaP) has shifted from a niche practice to an increasingly mainstream agenda in higher education, often promising more reciprocal relationships between students and staff. Yet while the goal of these practices may be access to, and deeper understanding of, student voices and their lived experiences, there are diverse routes to achieving this, each with distinct purposes, constraints, and resource demands. This masterclass will begin with a critical overview of the state of play of SaP, including its benefits for learning, belongingness, and institutional decision making, alongside enduring questions of inclusion, power, and scale. Participants will then examine four mechanisms drawn from research and practice: one to one students mentoring staff, CoLab co design workshops, student advisory groups, and students as co-researchers. Through applied scenarios, participants will evaluate which mechanism aligns with a given context, considering purpose, funding, and timeline, before designing their own action point. Whether new to partnership or looking to extend existing practice, participants will leave with a concrete next step to take back to their institution.
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Building an Award-Winning Academic Profile
This interactive session will highlight ways to identify and articulate your contribution in teaching and learning. During the session, we will explore our unique contribution to teaching and learning, our sphere of influence, how to effectively evidence our impact, opportunities for dissemination and recognition and a greater understanding of how to tailor our profile for different contexts including promotion, external recognition and awards.