Teaching by subjects and contents where students passively receive knowledge is increasingly obsolete. Universities are opting for teaching strategies supporting skills development to face the labor, social, environmental, and economic conditions afflicting us. Employers demand increasingly complex skills; universities have identified experiential learning as giving access to real situations and learning by doing. One of the most advanced strategies is Challenge-Based Learning (CBL). Through real problem situations, faculty and students collaborate to solve an established challenge, with or without external stakeholders. This educational advancement has been global and is developing graduates with international skills, which ensures a world-class standard. Here we report a global study carried out in universities from three different continents, and we analyze the implementations of CBL in educational programs through cases in Mexico, The Netherlands, Ireland, and China. Developing skills and competencies is evident, and CBL is a viable way to ensure the success of Higher Education graduates. Obstacles in the transformation of faculty towards CBL are a similar fence in all cases. For CBL, the path needs to be explored, as it is on the frontline of educational developments that can be most helpful for developing a new paradigm in education.

Loss aversion has been shown to influence decision making in a host of social and economic contexts. This paper presents a novel assessment strategy that seeks to address issues of student engagement and academic integrity through the combination of the concepts of loss aversion and peer-assessment. Students faced the possibility of losing a small number of the marks they had previously ‘earned’ in a task in which they were required to accurately grade a peer’s work. A detailed rubric was designed to support students grading the work. Based on data collected via a survey and interviews, we show that students, despite disliking this assessment strategy, were more engaged in the assessment and felt that their critical thinking skills were enhanced as a result of this approach. The implications from this study includes the need for detailed guidance for students through, for example, rubrics, lecturer accessibility and exemplars.

Curricula in higher education is under increasing pressure to contribute to economic and societal enhancement. Educators are the primary source of curricula development and thus most centrally placed to help deliver on these significant requirements for higher education. Given their central role, the aim of this research was to elucidate the voice of educators with regard to their experience of curriculum development practice and discourse, in the context of higher education. The key objectives in realising this aim was to engage educators in curriculum development discourse; illuminate their philosophical beliefs and influence on curriculum development; irradiate current curriculum development practice; and contribute to capacity building among educators in relation to their role in curriculum development. The study was conducted across four higher education institutions in Ireland, and is part of wider piece of research which formed my Ed.D. Discourse analysis was used as a methodology within a post-structural theoretical framework which facilitated layered analysis and questioning of curriculum development practice and discourse. The findings contribute to the current curriculum development conversation by offering a framework for curriculum development practice and discourse. I argue if this framework is used as an early discourse and planning tool it can offer transformative potential for curricula.

This paper shares the experience of a group of academic developers’ engagement in collaboratively working towards the completion of an online open-access professional development (PD) course designed to support higher education teachers to engage with a new professional development framework. Committee members of the Educational Developers in Ireland Network set out to complete the course as a demonstration of their commitment to their own PD and to experience the process with a view to becoming facilitators of the course. An auto-ethnographic approach was used to capture this experience, and findings demonstrate an inspiring alternative to PD that supports academic developers in the quest to legitimise and prioritise their own PD in the context of highly pressurised roles.