Michael Pazinas

Michael Pazinas is Acting Director of the Center for Educational Innovation at Zayed University, where he leads initiatives at the intersection of pedagogy, faculty development, and AI. A Senior Fellow of Advance HE and certified Quality Matters peer reviewer, he has developed programs on learning integrity, AI-resilient assessment, and faculty development. His current work examines how educators can design environments that foster authentic human learning in the presence and impact of generative AI.

Michael is an interdisciplinary professional who combines academic rigor with domains such as design thinking, learning sciences, and evidence-based learning strategies and techniques adapted from fields like UX design. Through LX.ai, a faculty development initiative shortlisted for a Times Higher Education award, he has explored methods like persuasive and validation patterns as practical micro-experiments within the design cycle. These approaches give faculty ways to trial, refine, and evaluate learning interventions in practice while keeping the learner’s experience central. Alongside this, he integrates insights on emotion, creativity, and flow, recognizing their importance in sustaining motivation and making learning meaningful.Michael is an interdisciplinary professional who combines academic rigor with domains such as design thinking, learning sciences, and evidence-based learning strategies and techniques adapted from fields like UX design. Through LX.ai, a faculty development initiative shortlisted for a Times Higher Education award, he has explored methods like persuasive and validation patterns as practical micro-experiments within the design cycle. These approaches give faculty ways to trial, refine, and evaluate learning interventions in practice while keeping the learner’s experience central. Alongside this, he integrates insights on emotion, creativity, and flow, recognizing their importance in sustaining motivation and making learning meaningful.

His initiatives, including LIFE(Learning Integrity and Faculty Empowerment), position faculty as intentional designers of transformative experiences, where curiosity, struggle, reflection, and dialogue remain protected as the foundations of genuine learning.

Protecting the Struggle: Human Learning in a Post-Digital World

This session examines how authentic human learning can be sustained within post-digital environments shaped by automation, immediacy, and AI-generated production. It asks how educators can intentionally preserve the cognitive and emotional struggle that drives meaning-making, creativity, and growth.

Drawing on post-digital theory and the learning sciences, the session explores the tension between convenience and cognition, as well as efficiency and reflection. It argues that the very qualities often minimized in digitally mediated learning and creation, such as uncertainty, difficulty, and discomfort, are essential for authentic understanding and original work.

Attendees will consider how curiosity, reflection, and dialogue can be embedded in learning experiences that resist automation’s tendency to flatten process and outcome. Attention will also be given to how human production, across writing, design, and creative practice, can embody presence, judgment, and agency in mediated contexts.

By reframing the role of intentional design, the discussion positions educators as stewards of human learning and creation, protecting the struggle as a vital condition for authenticity and growth in a post-digital world.

Dr. Ghada Al Murshidi

Dr. Ghadah Al Murshidi is an Associate Professor in the Learning and Educational Leadership department at the College of Education and previously served in the Humanities and Social Sciences college at UAE University. Recognized for her academic and community contributions, she has received awards including the Young Emirati Researcher Prize, the Best Young Researcher Award, the Emirati Women’s Award, and recognition as the Best Academic Woman Achiever. She was also the first doctoral holder to voluntarily join the National Service. Dr. Al Murshidi participated in leadership initiatives such as the 50th Leaders’ Program and the Fatima Bint Mubarak Program for Political Empowerment. Her research focuses on language, literacy, Emiratization, service learning, and educational technology, especially mobile, blended, online, and virtual learning. Beyond academia, she authored “The Guide of Creativity and Innovation in the UAE,” led nationally funded research projects, and contributed as an Emirati expert in international initiatives. She is active in media, serves on editorial boards of Scopus-indexed journals, and frequently speaks at national and international conferences, advancing educational and social dialogue.