Towards sustainable technology‐enhanced innovation in higher education: Advancing learning design by understanding and supporting teacher design practice

Abstract Improving teacher design promises to be a scalable, sustainable approach to building capacity amongst a workforce faced with complex and evolving drivers of change in higher education worldwide. While design has long been recognised as a routine part of teaching, there has been renewed interest in supporting and understanding the design work that teachers do to foster innovation, particularly in technology‐enhanced learning, at institutional scale by influencing teachers’ practices. Re‐framing teaching as design usefully emphasises the creative problem‐solving needed to balance pedagogical, logistical and technical considerations within specific educational contexts, tailored to learners’ needs. There is potential for this re‐framing to build on and advance work in “learning design” and “design for learning” that has generated a wide range of practical supports and tools. In this article, we explore, problematise and conceptualise the notion of “teacher as designer” within the complexity of contemporary higher education through a critical review of existing empirical and conceptual work internationally. We offer insights into the current state of knowledge about teacher design in higher education, highlight gaps and possibilities, offer a new conceptualisation drawing on practice theory and set out propositions to provoke further debate about teacher design as a vehicle for sustainable innovation in higher education.