DrLuke Heemsbergen

I design and lead collaborative, evidence-driven experimentation, innovation, and improvement of curriculum informed by scholarship of teaching and learning as well as professional practice at discipline and faculty levels. My critical pedagogy centres on having students take part in the production and evaluation of the tools they work with and reflect on the circumstances that are produced. This is evident across my active teaching portfolio at Deakin.

Undergraduate

In Gamified Media (ALM201), I revised assessment and delivery practices for media and communication students to collaboratively design, prototype, and learn through gamified systems.

In The Arts of Changing the World: Global Challenges and Collaborative Action (AGC309) I designed the Faculty’s capstone Bachelor of Arts core unit, integrating a global Free online Course cohort of learners and soliciting industry case studies for our own students’ learning-by-assessment.

Postgraduate

In Digital Curation in the Age of AI (postgraduate ALC703), I redesigned the unit around critical, evidence-informed experimentation with generative AI, enabling students to interrogate bias, error, multimodality, and ethical limits through hands-on practice at the frontier of the discipline since 2023. 

In Making Sense of Online Communities (postgraduate ALC702), I deliver a full digital ethnography research loop with students’ projects, where students move from concept and research design through data collection, peer review, and reporting to produce scholarly, reflective, and methodologically grounded outputs in 11 weeks.

Course Direction

I serve as the inaugural Director of the Master of Artificial Intelligence for Design and Creative Practice — the first course of its kind in Australia. Here, we build creative practitioners' discernment in responsibly integrating AI (or not) into their workflows, embedding situated ethics-as-method (inspired by Pfefferkorn 2025) alongside industry practice into our Course Learning Outcomes. Practitioners are now expected to use AI, hold opinions about AI, and answer for AI’s consequences, yet few teaching models address the congressive and ingressive moments required (inspired by Cheng 2020) to sustain human craft, credibility, and care amidst AI. MAIDC is one of the first answers to that need.

Advisory Board, Postgraduate Communication Degrees (member, 2025-2026)