Professor Anastassis Kozanitis holds a doctorate in education from the University of Montréal, where he specialized in university teaching and pedagogy. He has a master's degree in the same area from Université Laval, Quebec City and a degree in psychology. His areas of interest are student motivation and engagement, affective dimensions in learning, classroom management and teaching innovations in university context. Currently he is a faculty member in the department of didactics at the Université du Québec à Montréal, Canada. For more than 10 years he has worked as faculty development in the Center for teaching and learning at Polytechnique Montreal. He is also an international consultant helping university programs to develop competency-based curricula, mainly in Latin American countries.

In line with higher education' s shift from teaching to learning, we emphasise the reasons why instructors should design teaching and learning activities that provide students with opportunities to reflect on how and what they are learning. There are three main takeaways we wish to communicate: 1) learning is facilitated when the context and object of learning make sense to the learner; 2) innovation and technology should leverage pedagogy; 3) active learning pedagogies have proven more efficient.