Digital Learning with CARE: co-creating human-centred futures in the age of AI

Sharing practice and looking ahead

It was a pleasure to co-organise and MC the Digital Learning with CARE Symposium 2026.

One of the most striking things about it was something still too rare in Higher Education: the range of roles and perspectives meaningfully present in the room. Academic staff, professional services colleagues, students, learning designers, learning technologists, librarians and external partners were not arranged around a single authoritative voice, but brought together as people whose different forms of work and experience all shape digital education.

What also gave the event its force was that it was grounded in practice. The day did not begin from abstract claims about innovation, nor from the usual inflated language that often surrounds AI and educational change. It began with people sharing what they had done, built, tested, revised, and learned. Practice was the starting point, and from it came reflection, discussion, and critique. That gave the conversations a seriousness they might otherwise have lacked. And every presentation had several questions; the world cafe tables were full for both rounds.

This felt especially important because the central question of the symposium was how to shape a human-centred and student-centred digital future under the pressures, seduction and possibilities of AI. The event made clear that AI is not one issue with one solution, but a set of pressures and opportunities arriving differently across assessment, feedback, integrity, workload, confidence, and access.

Again and again, the day showed that co-creation is demanding, slow, and friction-filled work that requires skill and long-term thinking. But it also showed that shared practice and capability are where genuine thinking together begins.