Twenty-Five Years of Active Learning in Higher Education: Centring the Student in the Learning Process

Introduction

The journal Active learning in Higher Education (ALHE) has been published now for 25 years and in this overview article as the founding editor, I propose to review the higher education learning and teaching landscape over that period, exploring the many changes we’ve seen in that time as well as some of the contestants that remain forever on the horizon. In many ways the founding years were a golden age, with ample funding for pedagogic innovation and dissemination of good practice and an increasing openness to change. But the student experience today has benefited hugely from decades of invaluable research which nowadays underpin HE teaching, learning and assessment practices worldwide.

Establishing the Journal

In 2000 I was appointed as one of only four staff involved in setting up the UK-based Institute for Learning and Teaching, (ILT, later ILTHE), at a very exciting time, with active learning gaining real traction across the sector. At a time when there was a clear gap in linking research and practice, it felt like a bold and energising opportunity. The establishment of the ILT had been one of the recommendations of the Dearing report in the UK (NCIHE, 1997), aiming to offer parity of esteem between teaching and research as a membership organisation for UK accredited teachers and supporters of learning. It was envisaged that it would define standards and accredit training for university teaching in the UK, as well as actively promoting the innovative ideas that were currently shaping the field of higher education teaching, learning and assessment. These included fostering deep rather than surface learning, as promoted by Marton and Saljo (1976) earlier but gaining greater traction at this time, and ensuring a joined-up curriculum as promoted inter alia by Biggs (1996). Innovative thinking on assessment was promoted extensively world-wide by Boud (2000), McDowell (1995) and indeed myself with Brown and Knight (1998).

Once accredited, members had to pay an annual fee, and the ILT needed therefore to make them feel it was worthwhile to pay this year on year, and one of the benefits we quickly established was the journal, as well as an annual conference, regional events for members and book series.

Active Learning in Higher Education was regarded as a core membership benefit, providing as it did a forum for informed discussion about assessment, teaching and learning and providing a locus for discussion, interaction and reports of innovations. We encouraged active members to contribute articles about their pedagogic practice and research, and peer review to assure the quality of the content was considered essential, as was the encouragement of international contributions. The title was chosen to reflect an ongoing movement away from passive-receptive modes in the classroom globally, as the engagement of students became increasingly important.

We approached several publishers, with Sage being the agreed best fit for our ambitions. I established an editorial board that incorporated the initial aims I had envisaged for the journal then asked the board to help me refine and improve those aims, before opening up the journal for submissions. As all the board members were experienced and recognised practitioners in the field, I encouraged them to submit articles for the first issue, subject to peer review of course. Very quickly after that we were inundated with journal articles which kept our panel of reviewers very busy. In those days I had a large paper folder listing reviewers’ areas of expertise and interests, and, as founding editor I had to manually search to match reviewers and article topics, not a practice I imagine the current editor practices in hard copy form.

The ILT, Then the Higher Education Academy, Now AdvanceHE Has Evolved

When the ILT was established, we had seed-corn funding from the UK Higher Education Funding Council for England, also covering Northern Ireland, and later by Wales and Scotland. This was superseded by the UK Higher Education Academy, which later became AdvanceHE, both with a much wider global focus and was funded entirely differently, with broader organisational priorities, particularly since the inclusion of the UK Leadership Foundation, which promoted effective leadership in Higher Education, including the Aurora development programme for women. Nowadays AdvanceHE’s ambitions are significantly more international, with partnerships across the world including in Australasia and the Gulf States. At the ILT, where the journal originated, we weren’t initially permitted to have members or accredited routes to membership from outside the UK, although we made good use of international contributors particularly to our publications, events and conferences. The journal is no longer closely associated with the organisation that spawned it, having developed an independent life of its own.

The Higher Education Academy was formed from a merger of the ILTHE, the Learning Support network of Subject Centres and their Generic Centre and National Coordination Team for the Teaching Quality Enhancement Fund which was a major England and Northern Ireland donor of teaching related grants inter alia. TechDis, which was set up by the not-for-profit technology and data agency Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC), to foster and encourage the use of appropriate technologies in higher education teaching. The TechDis office was co-located and worked closely with HEA and was very important in helping deliver the mission to promote equality and inclusion.

The HEA then merged with the UK’s body the Leadership foundation for Higher Education, which offered support and advice on leadership, governance and management to UK universities as well as the Equality Challenge Unit to form Advance HE in 2018. Their mission has drifted away from an exclusive single focus in 2000 on higher education teaching and learning support, nowadays to support leadership and governance issues, redress inequalities and, like the ILT, enhance HE learning and teaching. Home | Advance HE. It now has broader international outreach, offering training and accreditation worldwide, and has to take nowadays a much more commercial approach than the old ILT whose finances were underpinned by the UK university funding councils.

The Higher Education Context Has Been Transformed in 25 Years

The Higher Education offer has expanded in many nations to many applicants previously denied it, as part of a global trend towards massification, (with regrettably exceptions, e.g. in Afghanistan for women’s access). What was in many countries regarded as an opportunity for elites to gain a degree (only 10% of the age cohort for my generation in the UK were admitted to university, with much lower rates for women) is now often available for more like 50% in many nations. At that time, not only were no tuition fees paid for UK home students, but many students also received grants to cover living and travel costs, and for the fortunate like me on an English Literature degree, very generous book grants.

Wider access has had huge benefits for applicants, particularly those from non-traditional backgrounds. However, mass higher education in many nations led not only to the loss of grants but also the imposition of fees for full-time resident students in the UK in 1998 for example, and in Ireland a few years later. This has come at a substantial personal cost, with unprecedented crippling debt accruing to UK and other students, (although that has been the case in many nations for decades of course). International students, once a minority on many programmes, often make up substantial portions of the student body in nations like Australia, the Netherlands, the UK and Ireland which aim to offset reductions in government support for higher education by opening up access to paying students from round the world, often heavily subsidising home student fees.

Student Learning

How students learn has changed too: 25 years ago it was still common to talk about ‘reading for a degree’ but many staff are now reporting students’ reluctance to actually undertake deep dives into lengthy texts, preferring instead often to use electronically-accessible class readers or indeed AI-produced pre-digested summaries of key points, associated with directed study activities, which can provide challenges to those who believed that students must work hard to gain a degree. This is likely to be part of the commodification of HE, with student’ roles changing within a market-led context.

A positive side of this trend is the active engagement of students as partners: In the 20th Century, students were often treated as fortunate subjects within the learning process who should be grateful for the opportunity to be there: with the introduction of fees there has been a greater recognition of the essential role students can play, particularly in areas like quality assurance and student satisfaction. This has developed further in many nations to involve students in active partnerships to make learning happen, for example as described by Healey and others

Co-creating, co-producing, co-learning, co-designing, co-developing, co-researching, and co-inquiring involve sharing power and an openness to new ways of working and learning together and, hence, challenges traditional models of HE relationships. (Healey et al., 2015).

Twenty five years ago, the dominant mode for university teaching in many nations was within lecture theatres which remained largely unchanged from Medieval times, and while lecturing remains a significant means of course delivery, many are nowadays questioning approaches that require students to learn at the feet of their masters (sic), taking notes within settings where interaction was not widely encouraged. We learned so much about the positive advantages of on-line learning opportunities during the pandemic, so wise practitioners are continuing to use the best aspects of virtual approaches (e.g. not having to repeat live lectures for parallel cohorts, and making lectures more interactive by using the Chat function in Teams) while welcoming the return to face-to-face teaching (Bamber, 2026).

Groupwork is actively encouraged in formal and informal contexts much more and its benefits for both staff and students are recognised in terms of effective learning (see, e.g. Hartley et al., 2022). However, the pandemic shutdown of universities caused a rethink in many universities worldwide, as approaches had to be drastically reconfigured when face-to-face encounters were restricted, which in the longer term had some significant benefits.

The pandemic caused many other changes in university teaching, learning and assessment once on-campus learning had been made virtually impossible: for example, nowadays many more staff work from home regularly, which makes informal support less easy to access than when students could just knock on office doors to seek help. This change has been beneficial in some cases since some students might be reluctant to interrupt staff in person, but more likely to do so virtually.

We have also seen a rise in the involvement of what are termed third space professionals (Webster, 2022; Whitchurch, 2015), such as learning support staff, library and information management specialists, IT staff, counsellors and others at each stage of the student learning process, from recruitment to ‘outduction’, which was once clearly seen as the exclusive domain of academic staff but are nowadays recognised for their expertise Morgan (2013).

Many if not most HEIs are reporting a post-pandemic reluctance of students to spend as much time as previously on campus: once it had been proven that so much could be done effectively through virtual means, it seems harder to justify the requirement for physical attendance, especially for commuter students who don’t live on campus.

Perhaps the biggest change in the last 25 years has been the widespread introduction of Large Language Models and their applications, including Chat GPT. There has been an almost existential panic among academics as they recognise that it is almost impossible to distinguish students’ own-produced work from that generated by AI. At first colleagues tried to find ways to prevent or manage its use, including the use of traffic light systems: Red: do not use AI under any circumstances, Amber: students may use AI in some instances but must clearly acknowledge its use and Green: AI can be used on all occasions. As AI systems became more steadily sophisticated, making its detection almost impossible, increasingly we are going to have to recognise that its use is impossible to detect and punish, so we might as well recognise this and move to different academic practices.

We have a major balancing act nowadays to ensure that assessment is fit-for-purpose and practical while serving the double duty (Boud, 2000; Carless, 2025) of including formative assessment that positively supports student learning as well as summative assessment in terms of grades and marks leading to certification of achievement, which has been made even tougher with the challenges AI offers. We know that interactive assessment engagements like Objective Structures Examinations (OSCEs), vivas and other forms of oral assessment can achieve both of those aims, but with massification of Higher Education, with substantially higher numbers in cohorts than 25 years ago, these can be hard to achieve in a meaningful way

But let’s not panic and rush back to exclusive use of time-constrained, on-campus, invigilated, traditional exams, because, after decades of research we know their limitations compared to more authentic kinds of assessment (Brown & Sambell, 2023). In any case, almost every environment in which graduates are going to be living and working will require the use of some form of AI in decades to come, so we can’t, any more than Canute could, expect to hold back the tides.

The World of Journal Publishing Has Got Tougher

Journal publishing has always been a commercial challenge: when I first set up the journal, I had to make a business case to Sage to demonstrate its cost effectiveness to them, based initially on the journal being a membership benefit included free for paid-up members. Now journals are publishing predominantly online, some of those cost challenges have been reduced, and in many countries, there is heavy reliance on journal publishing being seen as part of academic citizenship, with writers and reviewers being unpaid and in journals like ALHE not requiring page-rate fees for publishing.

However, the system is fragile and getting tougher, with most editors finding it harder and harder to get reviewers to contribute reviews in a timely fashion, with so many other calls on their time. This has been exacerbated by increasing numbers of journals being published with 34 (40%) of what Tight regards as the increasing numbers of journals in the field being founded since 2000 and higher education journals increasing in size and frequency. For example, Studies in Higher Education were published twice a year in 1986 but now publishes 12 issues annually (Tight, 2024). Indeed, Active Learning in Higher education is also moving from three to four issues a year, allowing additional outputs to be published. This is reinforced by Seeber (2025), who suggests that higher education research field has grown five-fold in the past 20 years and Maral (2024), who argues that the growth trend has accelerated significantly in the last two decades. Hence the pressure on editors is both to manage more submissions and to achieve review decisions promptly while maintaining editorial consistency and managing the quality of the outputs.

An interesting perspective by Squazzoni et al. (2021) suggests that in the first wave of the pandemic, there was a potential cumulative advantage for men as women, particularly junior ones) submitted fewer manuscripts than men for reasons not hard to speculate during lockdown.

Early issues of ALHE were more reliant on project-based and less research-intensive outcomes than is the case now, and clearly overall qualitative alongside quantitative research is more acceptable than formerly in HE journals, with less focus on pressure for the use of randomized control trials. Maral (op cit) suggests that now as then the main themes of these journals include assessment, internationalisation, equity and social justice and pedagogy, with significant international authorship. More recently and highly observable are the demonstrable challenges to traditional pedagogies across all aspects of the curriculum by experiences during the pandemic lockdown, and increasingly the implications of artificial intelligence (AI).

Active Learning in Higher Education Today

I am delighted that Active Learning’s cover design remains pretty much the same as the one I chose 25 years ago, and the submission guidelines are very similar, including the focus and rigour, with a strong emphasis on recognition of the need for diversity and the internationality of expected submissions as evidenced by my editorial in Issue One. It is gratifying to see this focus on inclusivity is still central to the mission of the journal, as reflected in the first editorial of the current editor, who emphasises the crucial importance that

our research on teaching and learning is inclusive of all our students, and that diversity among students and those who teach and support teaching is recognized and celebrated. (McNally, 2024, p. 320)

Back then articles were emailed directly to me, but I imagine current submission routes via ScholarOne must make the process much more manageable. Our diversity and ethical guidelines back then were similar in concept but were much less clearly expressed. Then as now, there were no publishing fees for the journal, and the concept of Open Access wasn’t on the horizon at the time. Early issues contained at least one book review per issue but this was discontinued by ALHE some time ago. Limited numbers of hard copies are now produced, with many more readers accessing the journal virtually.

Conclusions

The substantial changes in higher education pedagogy that have followed the pandemic hiatus in modes of university teaching together with the impact of AI on all forms of learning have meant that the title of this journal is as relevant today as it was two and a half decades ago. Our challenge is nowadays to keep students engaged in active learning, at a time when learning materials are often bite-sized and delivered remotely, with many arguing for an increased role for teaching and assessment. Ensuring that interactions between students and their university teachers remain interactive, fostering deep learning is an ongoing challenge. Many are reporting a reluctance by some students to actually undertake deep dives into lengthy texts, preferring instead to use AI-produced pre-digested summaries of key points, associated with directed study activities. There are no quick fixes, and considerable pedagogic agility is needed to support students to fully and deeply engage with complex ideas through some form of slow learning as advocated by Sword (2023).

Notwithstanding the challenges to the world around journal publishing currently, I am optimistic that Active Learning in Higher Education has a positive future. There are still many university staff, third space professionals as well as academics, who are fascinated by how we can make learning happen (Race, 2010), actively and productively. For all the talk regularly encountered about the delivery of learning (as if it were a parcel), this cannot happen without an active partnership between staff and students (more like delivering a baby).