This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License. 1. Introduction Design education today faces a wide range of competing demands from stakeholders, including students, academics, employers and professional and accrediting bodies. As a fundamental part of developing a new Bachelor of Design curriculum at Queensland University of Technology (QUT), Australia, there was a need to examine such expectations and societal needs more closely, with the acknowledgement that courses will be of little value if graduating students are unable to gain the skills, knowledge and capabilities deemed necessary to practice as designers in the future. Development of the new future-focused degree commenced in late 2017, with delivery to the first new cohort commencing in February 2019. The degree offers specialisation in seven
PurposeThe paper discusses the use of co-design for staff professional learning within higher education. It suggests that three distinct approaches to professional learning can be characterised as help-yourself platforms/services, drive-by workshops and co-design workshops. It makes pragmatic suggestions for where co-design might be used and heuristics for its successful use, based upon the authors' collective experiences.Design/methodology/approachThis practitioner paper presents a case-study of co-design in a university context. Staff from across disciplinary boundaries were brought together to co-design novel learning experiences for students for a non-traditional context.FindingsFindings from a case study are used to highlight the strengths of a co-design approach, as understood through the lenses of networked learning and self-determination theory. It juxtaposes co-design for staff learning with other approaches and finds it to be valuable and underutilised.Research limitations/implicationsThe research discusses a single case study involving two workshops with a sample size of 112 participants. It is included as an example of co-design for professional learning in higher education.Originality/valueCo-design for professional learning in higher education is poorly understood and presently underutilised. This paper addresses this gap by presenting an example of co-design for professional learning in higher education and theorising its significance.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.