The story behind the LDC Awards

In June 2024, we opened the Learning Design Community, a shared space where educators from institutions around the world exchange their most effective learning designs as templates that others can reuse. Behind every one of those designs is someone who asked a simple question: how can this be better for my students? That work usually happens quietly, so we created the Learning Design Community Awards to bring it into the light, and after a successful first edition in 2025, the awards are back for a second year.

This year, we introduced regional rounds for the first time. Educators submitted learning activities they built with FeedbackFruits in three categories: Active Learning Excellence, Feedback and Assessment Innovation, and Leveraging AI in Learning Design. In each region, a jury of learning design experts reviewed every entry on innovation, usability, impact and design quality, and chose one winner per category. With three regions (APAC, Europe, and the Americas, Africa and Middle East), that makes nine regional winners, and three of them will become this year's global winners.

‍

Meet the three winners from APAC

Active Learning Excellence: Sebastian Pahs, Hong Kong Baptist University

The challenge: in group projects, feedback usually flows in one direction. Students read the comments on their draft, skim them and move on, so they rarely learn what useful feedback actually looks like.

The design: in a game design course, Sebastian built a Peer Review activity around the early concepts of each group project. Each group submits a short description of its game design concept, and every student then reviews and comments on the concepts of other groups, pointing out strengths and areas to improve. Each group reads the feedback on its own concept and nominates the insights that helped most. The grade covers the submission, participation in the discussion and the feedback that was nominated, so judging the quality of feedback becomes part of the work. Concepts are submitted as a group while the discussion is individual, which encourages learning across groups, and anonymity can be switched on for both submitters and reviewers.

What changed: students practise giving specific and actionable feedback, and they learn to recognise the comments that really move their work forward. Sebastian also won an LDC Award in 2025, which makes this his second award in two editions.

You can read the full story of this design or use the template in your own course.

‍

Feedback and Assessment Innovation: Tanya Evans, University of Auckland

The challenge: with generative AI, the take home assignments in MATHS 130, a large first year mathematics course, became less useful as evidence of learning. Students could hand in correct answers without understanding the reasoning behind them.

The design: instead of trying to make the assignment AI proof, Tanya changed what is assessed. Students now record a two to five minute video in which they explain their solution, often filmed over their handwritten work. Three or four classmates then assess the correctness and clarity of each video with a structured rubric in Peer Review. Students record through Panopto in Canvas, subtitles are added automatically, and peer marks flow back into Canvas. The peer assessed part stays low stakes: 40% for submitting the video, 30% for completing the peer reviews and 30% for the average peer mark.

What changed: compared with the semester before ChatGPT, with the same teaching team, the pass rate rose by 16%, exam absenteeism dropped from over 15% to 9%, and more students earned A and B grades. The team sees these results as encouraging and wants to confirm them over the coming semesters.

You can read the full story of this design or use the template in your own course.

‍

Leveraging AI in Learning Design: Isaac Ka Chun Wan, HKUST

The challenge: students use generative AI every day, but they often miss its biases and hallucinations, and they do not always notice how much of their thinking they hand over to it. Reading about AI literacy rarely changes those habits on its own.

The design: Isaac built a one hour Interactive Document activity around AI literacy readings, which works best when students complete it before the lecture. As they read, students answer questions, test AI chatbots and image generators, and practise writing better prompts. They connect the readings to HalluciHunt, an app Isaac built to help students spot hallucinations, and they vote on how they typically use AI so they can compare their answers with their classmates and with the research. The activity closes with a discussion about cognitive offloading and a personal guideline for using AI ethically, and some of the questions can easily become group tasks.

What changed: students test the limits of AI for themselves, see how their peers use it and leave with their own guideline for using AI with good judgement.

You can read the full story of this design or use the template in your own course.

‍

What connects the three APAC winners

Each of the three APAC designs answers a question that many educators are asking right now: how do you make sure students really do the thinking themselves? At Hong Kong Baptist University, students learn to judge the quality of feedback. At the University of Auckland, they explain their reasoning instead of only handing in an answer, and at HKUST, they test AI critically before they rely on it.

Warm congratulations to Sebastian, Tanya and Isaac, and thank you to every educator who shared a design with the community this year.

‍

Join us at InspirED on 3 December

The nine regional winners are now in the running for three global titles, one in each category. This year, the ceremony comes to APAC: we will reveal the global winners live at InspirED on Thursday 3 December 2026 at 11:30 AEST, from QUT in Brisbane and online for anyone who would like to join. That is 9:30 in Hong Kong and 14:30 in Auckland, and everyone who registers also receives the recording afterwards.

In the meantime, you can meet all nine regional winners from APAC, Europe and the Americas, or browse many more learning designs in our template library.

👉 Discover the LDC Awards and register for the ceremony