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.

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Meet the three winners from Europe

Active Learning Excellence: Vasileios Karamanis, American College of Greece

The challenge: principles like active learning and technology enhanced learning are easy to read about, but much harder to put into practice. In a flipped teaching practice course, the readings students do before class can easily stay abstract when they do not have a clear reason to engage with them.

The design: Vasileios turned the reading into a consulting task with an Interactive Document. Students act as advisors to Professor Garcia, a fictional instructor, and evaluate the teaching approach in the scenario. Multiple choice questions in the document check their understanding along the way, and the activity ends with a reflection in which students compare the material with their own teaching and propose concrete ways to bring in more active and technology enhanced strategies.

What changed: students now arrive in class having analysed the approach, tested their understanding and reflected on their own practice, so class time can go to discussing their ideas together.

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

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Feedback and Assessment Innovation: Stuart Scott, University of Bath

The challenge: teamwork sits at the heart of the learning outcomes in the design project units at Bath, in Year 2, Year 3 and the MSc. Even so, it was hard to see how well students really worked together. Peer assessment was mainly used to divide marks, and problems with participation often came to light too late to do anything about them.

The design: together with Jon Noble, Stuart built a Group Member Evaluation activity that runs throughout each project. Students evaluate their group members regularly and add written feedback to every rating. A Feedback on Feedback step then asks them to reflect on the quality and impact of the feedback they received. The early rounds are formative and do not count towards the grade, so students feel free to speak openly, while the later summative rounds carry more weight. By comparing self ratings with peer ratings, staff can also see whether a problem lies with one student or with the whole group, which makes it easier to start a supportive conversation.

What changed: many groups now use peer evaluation in a constructive way, and students better understand why it matters. Based on their feedback, the team has also simplified the rubric.

You can read the full story of this design or use the template in your own course. If you would like to see how Bath approaches assessment and feedback across the whole university, you can also read our partner story with the University of Bath.

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Leveraging AI in Learning Design: Michelle Sisto, EDHEC Business School

The challenge: students increasingly build and use AI tools, but they often find it hard to judge how reliable those tools really are. In Prompt Engineering for Business, an elective in the master's programme, Michelle saw that building an AI assistant is one skill, while testing where it breaks and explaining why is quite another.

The design: together with Claudia Carrone, who won an LDC Award herself in 2025, Michelle designed a Peer Review activity around AI assistants that students build themselves. Each student builds an assistant and then evaluates the assistants of two classmates on three areas: interaction and user experience, accuracy and reliability, and safety and risk management. Students actively try to make the assistants fail by looking for edge cases. Reviews are anonymous, and grades depend on the quality of the written feedback rather than on the scores students give. In the final phase, students read the feedback on their own assistant, build a second version and reflect on what they changed and what they kept.

“The peer feedback is not an evaluation mechanism. It is a learning mechanism.”
Michelle Sisto, EDHEC Business School

What changed: in a group of 30 students, one round of peer review produced more than 360 peer responses. After three runs, the design is now used in a course of 800 students, and students leave with a much more grounded sense of what AI can and cannot do.

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

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What connects the three European winners

The three designs come from very different courses, yet they share one idea: each of them gives students a real role in their own learning. At the American College of Greece, students step into the shoes of advisors. At the University of Bath, they take responsibility for how their team works together, and at EDHEC, they become critical testers of the AI tools they build themselves. In every case, students think, explain and give feedback instead of only reading or handing in their work.

Warm congratulations to Vasileios, Stuart and Michelle, a big thank you to Jon Noble and Claudia Carrone for helping to shape two of the winning templates, and thank you to every educator who shared a design with the community this year.

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Join us at InspirED on 3 December

The nine regional winners are now in the running for three global titles, one in each category. 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. As this falls in the early hours of the morning in Europe, we recommend registering anyway, because everyone who registers 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