Abstract
Active learning is frequently named as a signature pedagogy in higher education teaching and learning frameworks (OECD, 2025). Active learning methods are viewed as prioritising and supporting students as engaged learners, facilitating deeper learning in busy higher education classrooms, lecture halls, and virtual learning environments (Doolittle et al., 2023). Without methods that engage students in their own learning, there is a fundamental belief that students will not gain the deeper knowledge and applied skills needed to support them outside of the university.
As we will read about in this special anniversary collection of papers, active learning emerged as a particularly important approach or set of approaches for teaching and learning in the 1980s and 1990s, at a time of great change for higher education institutions (HEIs). Over three decades later, higher education is experiencing a seismic shift in approaches to teaching and learning with the advent of Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) which is disrupting and challenging traditional and innovative teaching and assessment methods (Giannakos et al., 2025).
In the context of these profound changes and challenges to higher education teaching and learning, I invited scholarly contributions that would reflect on and consider what active learning now looks like and what it means for those who teach, and those who support teaching, in higher education. The 25th anniversary of Active Learning in Higher Education which we celebrated in 2025 seemed like an especially fitting opportunity for reflection on how we view and use active learning methods, and how we conduct research on these methods. I am delighted with the submissions to this special anniversary collection which do just that.
The first paper in this collection is by Kristin Børte (University of Bergen, Norway) and Sandris Zeivots (The University of Sydney, Australia), both members of the journal’s editorial board. The authors highlight that in the new GenAI landscape, it is ‘more vital than ever that learners are active participants and co-creators in educational activities’ (this issue, p. 208). To support students as active participants and co-creators, they ask us to critically think about how we define, value, and enact active learning in a rapidly changing higher education context. In particular, they highlight that the impact of technology and global connectedness forces us to ask who is active in teaching and learning, what constitutes or counts as active in light of the growing use of GenAI technologies in education, and how can we ensure that what we have designed as active learning activities promote students’ learning and participation.
For readers interested in the development of active learning as a concept and approach in higher education, this article is an essential read. The authors give a historical overview of active learning, highlighting the roots of active learning pedagogies in sociocultural theories of Dewey and Vygotsky, through to Bonwell and Eisen’s (1991) seminal book on active learning, recent systematic reviews by Doolittle et al. (2023), and the inclusion of active learning within the OECD’s (2025) framework on education for human flourishing. In keeping with this framework, they propose that active learning is crucial for critical GenAI literacy, which they stress is more than technical competence but rather includes ethical judgement and understanding ‘how knowledge, agency and practice are shaped within entangled human-technology relations’ (p. 211).
Relational approaches feature in this article as important in supporting student engagement, aligning with key issues around collaborative approaches with students to teaching and learning in higher education. Børte and Zeivots also highlight interdisciplinarity as needed in tackling technological and societal challenges through co-design approaches to curriculum and activity design. They describe GenAI as an (un)reliable collaborator that further challenges us to think about authorship and knowledge making. This has implications for how we research active learning approaches as we need to actively address and deal with issues of ‘equity, access, power and possibly creativity’ (p. 213) as relational and hybrid systems before more commonplace.
Looking forward, they propose three main concerns around active learning: firstly, the need to attend to the purpose of active learning designs in order to ensure meaningful learning rather than simply ‘visible busyness’; secondly, the need to grapple with changing assumptions about what it means to learn, know, and collaborate in what they aptly describe as ‘Human-AI entanglements’ (p. 214), stressing that technology is not simply a neutral add-on to current teaching practices; and, thirdly, the need to attend to how we design teaching and assessment to provide space for ‘uncertainty, experimentation and contestation, rather than seeking optimization or alignment’ (p. 215).
David Gijbels (University of Antwerp, Belgium) picks up the theme of how to conduct research on active learning in light of technology advances and shares his reflections on how active learning research has changed and evolved since the beginning of the journal. I invited David to contribute to this special anniversary issue, as a stalwart of the journal’s editorial board, to reflect on gains made in active learning research and current gaps and challenges for engaging and supporting students in their learning.
Looking back, he notes that from the very first issue of Active Learning in Higher Education, over 25 years ago, there was an emphasis on investigating teaching approaches that would support deep learning rather than surface learning (Rosie, 2000). Reflecting on the origins of deep versus surface approaches to learning, he highlights that the ‘belief that higher education fosters students’ development towards deeper approaches of learning is deeply embedded in our understanding of what higher education should accomplish’. However, he points out that longitudinal research does not confirm that students develop deeper approaches to learning over time but rather that changes in learning happen for specific groups of students and in specific learning conditions, suggesting that research should focus more closely on individual trajectories of learning and subgroup differences (Asikainen & Gijbels, 2017).
Addressing a limitation of many studies on deep versus surface learning (namely, an exclusive reliance on self-report data), he discusses research that adopts multimodal designs, particularly fitting and effective considering the emerging role of GenAI technologies in education. He reports on the use of eye tracking technology in conjunction with student self-reports of learning to show that deeper learning is likely to be the result of deeper processing of key textual elements rather than different patterns in time spent reading or looking at text. Importantly he advocates the use of AI with observational methods such as eye-tracking to provide insight into how students learn and where they may encounter difficulties, thus avoiding the use of intrusive methods during learning such as interviews or questionnaires. He gives a brief overview of an ongoing European-funded project, EYE-TEACH, co-created with teachers and which uses AI to analyse eye-tracking data and translate it into actionable guidance for teachers (e.g. real-time instructional adjustments or interventions). The findings so far suggest that teachers like the possibility of monitoring students in real time and getting support to make data-driven decisions while maintaining autonomy around decision making for students’ learning (www.eyeteach.eu).
Staying with this focus on research methods for investigating active learning approaches, Virginia Clinton-Lisell (University of North Dakota, USA, and former Editor-in-Chief of Active Learning in Higher Education), provides a detailed but accessible set of reflections and recommendations for more inclusive and equitable designs to improve students’ engagement and participation in higher education, including how we conduct research on active learning. I encourage close reading of Virginia’s reflections which highlight how active learning approaches have both promoted equity in student learning by providing better opportunities for historically underserved students in higher education (Burke et al., 2020) but have also likely excluded students. Drawing on Universal Design for Learning (UDL) as a useful framework for inclusive teaching she outlines proactive approaches to meetings students’ needs, including giving students choice in assignments and thinking critically about the modalities offered for students’ contributions and assessments. Delving into research methods, Clinton-Lisell offers valuable insights on how we generate research questions and advocates for an anti-deficit framework, which we will also see drawn out in-depth in the next paper in this collection by Eadon and her colleagues. Highlighting potential biases in research questions and the measures used to collect student data, she makes excellent recommendations for inclusive methods such as alphabetising category lists to avoid prioritising one group, and checking that students can access and participate in data collection on teaching and learning scholarship. Overall, Cinton-Lisell is advocating in this issue for intentional development of active learning research that seeks to actively include diverse students and minimise bias in data collection and participation.
In my inaugural editorial for this journal (McNally, 2024), I highlighted the importance of ensuring that active learning strategies include and support all learners’ engagement and participation in higher education. In particular, I called on the need for more research and reflection on active learning practices and the experiences of neurodivergent students. I am pleased that, in this anniversary collection, we have important scholarship on this very topic. Delving deep into the issue of equality, diversity, and inclusion in active learning methods in higher education, Lucie Eadon, Francesca Peruzzo, and Laura Crane (all from the University of Birmingham, UK) ask whether active learning for autistic learners is enabling or disabling. This is the first journal article in higher education to ask this specific question, and the authors provide a thought-provoking examination of potential barriers to the inclusion of autistic students created by active learning practices in higher education. Importantly, for every barrier identified, the authors propose ways to remediate and remove these barriers and ensure active learning practices are inclusive for autistic learners. The authors highlight the neuro-normative understandings of agency and identity underpinning active learning practices, such as problem-based learning or flipped classrooms, and propose ‘supporting autistic students to develop active learning identities that better align with their preferred degree of autonomy and participation in learning. Such approaches enable autistic students to reaffirm their identities as valued self-directed learners and to frame their voices, experiences, and preferences as of equal weight to their non-autistic counterparts’ (p. 244). Echoing the themes of the need for safety and inclusion within active learning contexts highlighted by Clinton-Lisell, the authors challenge us to reflect on and deconstruct neuro-normative assumptions and ‘distributions of power, creating greater spaces for the acceptance and empowerment of autistic learners’ (p. 244).
The authors also advocate for an openness to understanding students’ anxieties and a disposition towards making explicit all implicit expectations in their recommendations for inclusive active learning approaches. Again, I encourage close reading of this important contribution to the active learning literature in higher education scholarship and I believe this article will be of significant interest to all those who teach and support teaching and wish to ensure best practice is underpinned by a deep understanding of potential barriers to autistic students’ engagement and participation in higher education. The authors conclude with a section on working together for a ‘flourishing-focused discourse’, making an important call for neuro-affirming approaches within active learning, and for more research to refine active learning practices in higher education.
Also focusing on refining and reframing teaching and learning approaches in higher education to support student learning, the fifth paper in our special collection calls for a recalibration in the scholarship of teaching and learning to ‘broaden opportunities for the democratization and repositioning of students in ways that actively shape their education’ (p. 253). Alice Brown and Megan Kimber (both from University of Southern Queensland, Australia) invite us to reflect on scholarship which seeks to prioritise student voice and students as partners and to ask if we are truly involving students in the co-design of projects or as co-researchers. The first author, Alice Brown, is a member of our editorial board and an associate editor at the journal. We have had many wonderful discussions around the scholarship of teaching and learning, often very late in the evening for me in Ireland and very early in the morning for her in Australia. I am delighted with Brown and Kimber’s discussion of student voice for this collection and it reflects the authors’ commitment to empowering students as active agents in their learning. This contribution is a valuable prompt to reflect on whether collaborating with students as partners is often more evident in practice rather than in scholarship and research on teaching and learning, as the authors suggest. They thus invite us to engage in an ‘epistemic recalibration’ to reposition students as full partners in the scholarship of teaching and learning and as a necessary step to ‘democratising students as agents in their own learning and essential for the responsiveness of teaching and learning in higher education’ (p. 259).
In our penultimate contribution to this special collection, Veronica Bamber (Queen Margaret University, UK) discusses the key role of academic developers in supporting active learning in higher education teaching. Examining the many challenges facing universities and colleges, Bamber provides an overview of historical developments in higher education to show how the student experience has become an essential consideration for higher education institutions. This is another important read for those interested in how active learning became such a pivotal part of teaching and learning frameworks and why scholarship in teaching and learning is central to higher education success. The pressures on those who teach, and support teaching, are expertly described by Bamber. She proposes four essential capacities for academic developers in higher education to address ongoing and future challenges, namely skills in (1) working with uncertainty in changing contexts, (2) working with systems and cultures to leverage change, (3) fostering collaborations, and (4) balancing strategic with operational work. She concludes by noting that while there are significant challenges facing higher education, there are reasons to be optimistic, advocating for ‘continued reflection on past experiences to improve our skilled approaches to navigating the hard times to come’ (p. 277).
Fittingly, our anniversary collection concludes with an invited contribution from the founding Editor-in-Chief of Active Learning in Higher Education, Sally Brown (Leeds Beckett University, UK). One of the very great privileges of editing an international journal is the opportunity to meet with colleagues across the globe. Following my invitation to contribute to this anniversary collection, Brown and I met online to chat about a possible focus for her paper. After an enjoyable discussion around our mutual passion for reading research, she outlined her desire to write about changes to the journal since its first inception, including how the journal came about. I am thrilled to have these reflections published in the journal which Brown initiated and led, and to learn about the motivations behind the publication. Set up as a key part of the new UK-based Institute for Learning and Teaching (ILT), the journal was designed as a key benefit of membership of the ILT and as a vehicle for bridging the gap between research and teaching practice in higher education. I was very curious about the title of the journal, and as Sally tells us in her article, it was chosen to reflect the growing emphasis on engaging students in teaching and learning. It was also interesting to learn about the journal’s original close association with the ILT, an organisation which no longer exists but which was part of the journey towards what is now Advance HE.
Editing this special anniversary collection to mark 25 years of Active Learning in Higher Education has been an immense privilege. Connecting with past editors, and with new and experienced members of our editorial board, around their reflections on active learning has been uplifting as they share how far we have come with regard to supporting student engagement and the challenges ahead in light of GenAI. Commissioning new scholarship on active learning for inclusive teaching and learning in higher education has been a particular highlight of editing this collection (e.g. Eadon and colleagues, pp. 241–252) and I hope our readers enjoy and gain from these new contributions as much as I have.
