Conference Program

Challenge-Based Learning (CBL) is increasingly adopted in universities as an innovative pedagogy for cultivating civic competence and collective agency in digitally mediated societies. In the context of socio-ecological crises such as climate change, CBL is often presented as a way to connect higher education with democratic participation and societal problem-solving. In many cases these initiatives intersect with traditions of citizen science and community-engaged learning, where students collaborate with societal partners to generate socially relevant knowledge. Yet the democratic promise of CBL — classroom-laboratories that foster critical thinking, collaboration and responsible citizenship — is frequently constrained by institutional bottlenecks: partner coordination, mentor capacity, assessment practices, and invisible educator labour. These constraints are especially salient when CBL addresses crisis-scale, cross-disciplinary challenges that require sustained institutional support and transparent, participatory monitoring.

This paper reports a systematic review and proposes a design-oriented research agenda that foregrounds institutional orchestration as core infrastructure for resilient, democratic CBL. The review reveals a recurrent pattern: studies on CBL emphasise student outcomes and pedagogical designs for civic engagement, while studies on AI in education focus primarily on learner-facing tools rather than the institutional infrastructures required for digitally supported collaborative learning. The intermediate layer — workflows, role coordination, partner onboarding, governance mechanisms, and assessment modalities reconceived as instruments of empowerment rather than control — remains under-theorised and under-validated in real university settings. From a democratic perspective, this omission risks making crisis CBL episodic, inequitable, and overly dependent on a few motivated staff, thereby undermining sustained public engagement and equitable student voice.

Responding to this gap, the paper outlines a practicable research and design agenda using Action Design Research principles. The agenda treats AI as a coordination support (mentor onboarding aids, progress summarisation, artefact outcome mapping) that preserves human decision authority and enhances transparency — principles increasingly discussed in debates on digital democracy and algorithmic governance. Crucially, it reconceptualises monitoring and assessment: rubrics, participation metrics and reporting flows are reframed as tools to amplify student agency and partner accountability rather than as top-down inspection mechanisms. The agenda also foregrounds teacher competencies (facilitation, boundary-spanning with partners, assessment-as-empowerment) and institutional change mechanisms (role definitions, workload modelling, IT governance) necessary to scale crisis CBL ethically and sustainably.

By linking orchestration design to democratic aims, the paper contributes a bridge between pedagogical innovation and systemic infrastructure: resilient crisis CBL requires not only classroom practices but institutional orchestration within university systems that support equitable participation, transparent reporting, and sustainable staff workloads. The presentation will invite discussion on governance models, the ethics of AI-enabled coordination, competency frameworks for educators, and practical pathways universities can adopt to embed democratic, crisis-responsive CBL at scale.