Why we are telling this story now

Now that AI can write the essay, a finished assignment tells us less about what a student has learned. More and more, the real evidence of learning sits in the process itself, in the first attempt, the feedback that follows and the revisions students make themselves. Good ideas for making that process visible often stay inside one course, with no simple way to share them, support them or show that they work. We believe every good learning design deserves to travel further, and the three steps below show how it can.

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Step 1: One course, and nine designs you can reuse

The Learning Design Community Awards celebrate educators who redesigned a course with FeedbackFruits and shared that design with the community. This year, regional juries chose one winner in each of our three categories for every region: active learning excellence, feedback and assessment innovation, and leveraging AI in learning design. Each story explains the challenge the educator faced, how they redesigned their course and what changed for their students. Every design is also published as a template in the Learning Design Community, so you can explore it and adapt it for your own students.

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APAC

• Sebastian Pahs, Hong Kong Baptist University, turns students from passive receivers of feedback into active judges of what makes feedback useful, through discussion and peer feedback on game design concepts.
• Tanya Evans, University of Auckland, changed what a large mathematics course assesses, from the final answer to the reasoning behind it, with peer review of mathematical reasoning videos.
• Isaac Ka Chun Wan, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, helps students reflect on their own use of generative AI and build the habits to use it with judgement, including how to handle bias, hallucinations and cognitive offloading.

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Europe

• Vasileios Karamanis, American College of Greece, turns a reading on teaching principles into an active exercise with Interactive Document, with students advising a fictional professor.
• Stuart Scott, University of Bath, helps design students become better collaborators, with regular Group Member Evaluation built into their projects.
• Michelle Sisto, EDHEC Business School, uses peer review of AI assistants built by students to help them understand what AI can and cannot reliably do.

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Americas, Africa and Middle East

• Michael-Benjamin Minotti, Boston University, helps students in a programme of more than 500 learners think critically by discussing each other's podcasts on red flag legal issues.
• Max Chao, UC Irvine, gives every team in an in person course a voice in critiquing live case presentations, not only the team on stage.
• Fanny Tsai, UC Irvine, teaches students to treat an AI answer as a starting point, by comparing, verifying and explaining what they read.

If you are not sure where to begin, pick the challenge that sounds most like your own course and read that story first.

Meet all nine regional winners

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Step 2: Many institutions, and a year of evidence

One redesigned course tells a powerful story, and when the same thinking spreads across many institutions, it becomes evidence. Our Partner Impact Report 2025/26 follows our partners through a full academic year, from what educators built to what it made possible for their students, across 33K+ educators, 1M+ students and 200+ partner institutions in 28 countries.

A few findings stood out for us:

• 86% of activities are built from a proven design, so educators reuse what works instead of starting from a blank page.
• Students wrote over 4M pieces of feedback to each other and rated the feedback they received 9/10 for usefulness, in a year when AI could have written it for them in seconds.
• 80% of started learning activities get completed, which shows students moving through a design as intended while there is still time to act.
• 60% of partners doubled their reach by year three, as proven designs reach more students within each institution.

The report also shares the four steps that the partners who got furthest all took, and none of them began with an institution wide strategy. They started with a real problem rather than a tool, ran a small pilot over one semester and rolled out on evidence, tracked what worked and saved it as a template colleagues could reuse, and then started again with the next problem.

Get the Partner Impact Report 2025/26

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Step 3: One community, and a ceremony to celebrate it

The last step of the story brings people together. InspirED 2026 takes place on Thursday 3 December at QUT in Brisbane, as a free day of practical pedagogy for educators and learning designers, and the day closes with the global LDC Awards ceremony live on stage. We will celebrate all nine regional winners and announce the three global winners, one in each category.

The ceremony starts at 11:30 AEST, and you are warmly welcome to watch it online from anywhere in the world. Everyone who registers receives the recording afterwards, so you can watch it at a time that suits you.

Register to watch the ceremony live

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Where could your next step be?

Every story in this article began with one educator, one course and one problem worth solving. Whether you want to borrow a design for next semester, compare your own institution with the evidence in the report or celebrate with the community on 3 December, you will find everything together on one page.

Explore the full story

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And if a problem in your own courses came to mind while you were reading, we would love to hear about it. Book a meeting with our team, and we will look at your courses with you to find where a small first step would make the biggest difference.