Disruption in higher education—campus renovation, pandemics, digital transformation, generative AI—has reshaped how we teach, learn, and lead. This keynote explores how physical and digital learning environments can be used strategically for institutional renewal.

We’ll explore 25 years of disruptions at McGill University and examine how intentional design—from active learning classrooms and teaching labs to the integration of generative AI —can catalyze pedagogical change and foster resilience. Learning environments are not just places for instruction; they are levers for equity, engagement, and innovation. When aligned with research-based approaches and pedagogical principles, they become access points for transforming the student experience.

New disruptions like AI are pushing higher education to rethink its core business — new innovative tools such as MLY can disrupt not only how feedback can be gathered and analyzed differently, but also open new possibilities of how qualitative data can inform decision making.

Whether you're navigating strategic planning, digital infrastructure, campus renewal, or an AI strategy, this session offers a roadmap for leading change through learning environments —because innovation doesn’t just happen in response to disruption. It happens when we design through it.

Discover how Explorance MLY turns open-ended feedback into clear, actionable insights. In this session, you'll see how MLY uses AI to categorize comments into themes tied to the student experience, analyze sentiment, highlight crowdsourced recommendations, and flag pressing issues—all in one seamless workflow. By dramatically reducing the time and effort required to process qualitative feedback, MLY helps institutions quickly move from raw comments to informed action, empowering leaders to respond faster and more effectively to the voices of students and staff.

The student learning experience is constantly evolving, and so too must the methods we use to provide feedback to our dedicated faculty. At Conestoga, we've embarked on an ambitious 2-year journey to breathe new life into our feedback forms, originally crafted in 2014. Join us for an insightful session where we review the consultative process that fueled the successful overhaul, rebranding, and launch of our revitalized Student Course Feedback survey. Discover how we navigated challenges and opportunities to enhance student-faculty communication!

Join academic and institutional leaders for an engaging discussion on how universities are using feedback analytics to truly amplify the student voice. This session will explore effective strategies for collecting, interpreting, and acting on student feedback to drive meaningful change in teaching, learning, and the overall student experience. Panelists will share best practices, real-world examples, and lessons learned in building a culture of engagement and continuous improvement through data-informed decision-making.

Course evaluations are a complex process requiring continuous adaptation to meet stakeholder needs and evolving data interpretation practices. Recognizing the importance of clear and meaningful data presentation, we conducted a 2022 Explorance Faculty Research Grant Project to understand how instructors at our university interpret and use course evaluation data. Through one-on-one interviews (N=13) and surveys (N=648), we identified critical gaps in how evaluation data were presented in the Blue-generated reports, highlighting the need for a more intuitive and user-friendly design.

This presentation will outline our two-year journey in redesigning course evaluation reports, using a UX design framework (Norman, 2013) that integrates principles of usability, accessibility, and data visualization (Tufte, 2001). By engaging in iterative consultation with instructors and academic leadership, we applied user-centered design methodologies,” conducting usability testing, gathering stakeholder feedback, and refining report prototypes” to ensure the new reports effectively support data-driven decision-making. The result is a modernized, more intuitive reporting format that enhances clarity and facilitates meaningful engagement with evaluation data.

We will share insights from customizing Blue reports, addressing diverse stakeholder needs through creative problem-solving, and applying UX principles to optimize the user experience. By consciously defining how course evaluation data is presented, we aim to empower instructors to derive actionable insights and make informed pedagogical decisions. This session will provide practical strategies for leveraging Blue features to modernize reporting, improve data interpretation, and enhance the overall user experience for instructors.