Record
Event Report
How can we find the right ways to solve problems in a rapidly changing world? As more and more educational innovation groups emerge, how can their resources be connected? On May 8, the first session of the “Interdisciplinary Learning Community,” themed “Cross-Boundary Ecosystems,” invited Liu Chien-Cheng, Chief Innovation Officer of the NTU College of Innovation and Design, and Tsai Tsung-Lin, Education Project Manager at SIMFO, to respond to these questions from the perspectives of international trend observation and practical implementation experience. Liu brought back firsthand observations from SXSW EDU 2026, focusing on how to understand teaching decisions in a more systematic way. Tsai shared his experience with Hundr ED in supporting global educational innovation organizations, exploring how interdisciplinary learning can move from ideas to systems and from isolated initiatives to ecosystem collaboration.
First, Liu Chien-Cheng shared observations from several events he attended at SXSW EDU 2026 and identified several educational trends worth attention. One of the concepts was Decision Intelligence (hereinafter DI). DI is a decision-making framework that combines methodology, processes, and technology to help decision-makers understand how today’s actions affect the outcomes they hope to achieve in the future. Liu pointed out that DI is essentially a way of thinking that begins with the end in mind: first clarify the desired outcome, then work backward to examine what one should actually do. This shift in mindset can help prevent decision-makers from expending their energy worrying about variables they cannot control, while overlooking the parts they can intervene in and change.
In discussing the establishment of partnerships, Liu also raised points for reflection. He observed that collaboration in teaching settings often remains at the level of one-off activities (event-based), making it difficult to genuinely solve problems. He argued that what is more worth pursuing is systematic co-creation (system-level), in which partners jointly design projects to solve problems and build sustained, mutually beneficial relationships among multiple parties. He also pointed to a concern brought about by AI: AI is fundamentally designed to eliminate friction, yet this characteristic may gradually weaken interpersonal relationships and trust. How to rebuild trust between people in the age of AI is an issue he believes deserves continued attention.
Finally, Liu Chien-Cheng summarized his takeaways from participating in SXSW EDU 2026: when AI enables everyone to obtain answers tailored specifically to them, knowing what one wants becomes even more crucial. What a person wants is often related to how much failure they have experienced—only through concrete failures can people develop genuine viewpoints. He believes this is precisely an issue that future university education needs to address seriously.
Next, Tsai Tsung-Lin shared his practical experience visiting the Finnish educational innovation organization Hundr ED in 2025. From the perspective of an educational organization, he explored how organizations can connect with one another and form an educational ecosystem. He observed that the problems educational innovators face are often closely interconnected, yet they are constrained by the mission boundaries and resource ceilings of individual organizations. This was also the central question he sought to answer through Hundr ED’s experience: when the “willingness to innovate” encounters “resource constraints,” how can we cross organizational boundaries and find partners who can work together to sustain impact? Hundr ED itself is an example of practice that is “ecosystem-centered”—its core team has fewer than ten members, yet its service reaches 5,000 organizations and more than 900 judges worldwide.
According to his analysis, this relies on a three-layer support system. The first layer builds a database of educational innovation, enabling resources from different places to be discovered by one another. The second layer enhances teams’ credibility through award recognition, thereby opening up opportunities to collaborate with governments and other organizations. The third layer establishes a mutual-support community, allowing organizations to support one another. To gain a deeper understanding of how this ecosystem operates, Tsai interviewed 20 stakeholders and used the findings to draw a systems map. He identified three findings, each corresponding to one of the three layers of the support system: international endorsement provides legitimacy for school teachers seeking resources; Hundr ED’s translation of value helps local organizations cross language and resource gaps, enabling small organizations to connect with mainstream systems; and the mutual-support community ensures that educational innovators are no longer isolated, helping them find the psychological support needed to keep moving forward.
Drawing on Hundr ED’s experience, Tsai concluded by proposing directions Taiwan could learn from: identify one’s position within the ecosystem, jointly build infrastructure and resources, and continue experimenting and learning through trial and error. He concluded with one sentence: “This is not about asking you to set aside your own mission, but about enabling your mission to go further.” Educational innovation requires not only a learner-centered approach, but also an ecosystem-centered one.
At the end of the event, Huang Shu-Wei, a teacher at the NTU College of Innovation and Design and the event moderator, posed two questions to guide the speakers in further dialogue. The first concerned workshop design and how a systems map can function in a workshop. Liu Chien-Cheng noted that workshop design may appear to be an extremely broad question, but it can be narrowed down to three key points: clarify what the workshop cannot accomplish, identify what the activity’s input is, and design an effective way to converge the discussion. Tsai Chien-Lin added a perspective from systems mapping: the value of a systems map lies in integrating a large number of different viewpoints—but this requires the participation of people from different roles so that diverse perspectives can truly converge in the map. The second question focused on the role of AI: can AI serve as a facilitator? Liu Chien-Cheng remained cautious, pointing out that “making decisions” is a step AI cannot replace, and that when data becomes overly complex, AI cannot overcome the limits of human processing. Tsai Chien-Lin offered a different point of entry: the value of AI may lie not in facilitation, but in connection—it can quickly grasp global trends and identify which organizations are worth connecting with one another, enabling the role of the “connector” to be enhanced or even undertaken by AI.
Note: The “Interdisciplinary Learning Community” is jointly promoted by the Taiwan Association for Innovative Interdisciplinary Education (AITE) and the Office of the Ministry of Education’s “Pilot Program for Flexible Interdisciplinary Study.” It is expected to be held once a month, continuing to invite practitioners, researchers, and educators to exchange ideas and engage in dialogue.
