This presentation highlights a new academic partnership that evolved in 2025 between the Faculty of Business in TU Dublin and Humber Polytechnic in Toronto. The Irish and Canadian HE systems face similar challenges in the development of T&L practices and systems. The project's aim is to reimagine how T&L spaces can enact connections, break-down barriers to participation and active learning and to provide students with agency over the spaces they are learning in, both on-and-off campus. The project explores how tools such as digital twins, virtual reality (VR), and collaborative design platforms can support this reimagining of learning space. There are three themes that the collaborative project is investigating over a 16-month timeframe, focusing on how emerging digital tools support cross-institutional collaboration and learning space design:

• What are the technology tools and processes that most effectively support cross-institutional virtual collaboration in scanning, sharing, and re-imagining physical learning spaces?
• How does engaging in cross-institutional virtual teamwork and co-creation of learning experiences translate to developing employability skills/competencies among students?
• What are the resources, training, and costs (both financial-and time-based) required to implement and sustain the digital-twin + sandbox model at scale?

The presentation provides an overview of the project themes, underpinned by a technology-enhanced connected pedagogical framework which seeks to integrate modern design principles with accessible and purposeful technology. The theoretical foundations from which this project arises are social constructivist in nature and predicated on there being complex interplays between the pedagogical intentions of collaborative learning space designs and the student experience ambitions of the cross-institutions that shape the look, feel and function of those spaces (Finkelstein et al., 2016).

From a University-of-Sydney-Business-School learning spaces project, we are cognisant that the size, shapes and technologies within T&L spaces are '...capable of making learning sessions empowering, inspirational, collaborative events or, on the contrary, a stagnant, tedious endurance' (Power & Supple, 2021, p. 91). Therefore, staff development with emerging technologies is a key component. Educator experiences are shared and recorded by means of relevant collaborative tools (e.g. Miro) for project planning and development. International student co-operation is integral to the work with shared, co-created virtual spaces being central to achieving this. We consider the extent to which such virtual spaces offer a genuine sense of ‘presence’ that can complement current physical space provision (Williams et al., 2025).

Such activities, both from a student and an educator/facilitator perspective, are explored in the context of established frameworks (COIL (Collaborative Online International Learning - Rubin, 2017); key characteristics are investigated including; i) international collaboration, ii) curriculum integration (student co-creation will exist as part of assessed coursework, not as an add-on), iii) online interaction, iv) intercultural competence development and v) co-teaching modules. As such, insights will be uncovered both in terms of the capacity for collaborative, experiential, co-creation amongst students but equally in terms of the potential for multi-disciplinary cross-cultural teams to investigate new methodologies towards rapid prototyping.

Working in multi-disciplinary student teams, exploration of different idea-creation pipelines to optimize virtual and physical learning spaces will be disseminated. Bigger questions for institutions of how to scale-up the design and evaluation of such collaborative activities effectively will be discussed along with jointly identifying key success factors towards quantifying the impact on T&L practice for the future. Presenters will reflect on the emerging design principles and decisions and how they worked towards scaffolding capacities of cross-institutional connected learning, with a view to provision of practical guidance for others seeking to implement similar initiatives. Data collection is scheduled with the collaborating students and staff in both institutions to research the impact of the project, across the three themes highlighted.