The emergence of student-centred terminology in educational policy has different origins, but three interconnected trends interplay in bringing a stronger focus toward what students are doing and learning in higher education.

First, working life increasingly demands that professionals have a capacity for change and for taking on responsibilities in shifting contexts of collaboration. As fields of knowledge grow more complex, the demand for advanced skills, such as knowledge integration, the ability to work with multifaceted problems and collaboration across domains of expertise, are increasing. This leads to increased interest in engaging students in explorative and knowledge-generating activities. We also see a concern towards developing ‘authentic’ tasks and learning environments that provide experiences with the type of problems or situations that characterise professional life (Herrington, Reeves & Oliver, 2014; Litzinger et al., 2011).

Second, there is an increased emphasis on monitoring the quality of educational practices and institutions at the local, national and international level. This has given rise to a range of new actors and organisations engaged in developing higher education practices, such as student organisations, university alliances, quality assurance agencies and directorates, and networks like AEC. These developments are nourished by international collaboration and policy coordination, including the joint efforts and activities that constitute the European Higher Education Area (EHEA).¹ The policy discourse on student-centred learning is entwined with notions of lifelong learning and flexible educational arrangements, through which higher education may serve the evolving knowledge economy by fostering mobility and employability. This is further served by a well-developed infrastructure of standards and tools addressing input and output factors, such as qualification frameworks and learning outcomes descriptions.

Third, both the calls for more ‘authentic’ and explorative learning activities and the efforts to promote innovative learning and teaching practices carry an implicit criticism of the learning environments offered in higher education. A common assumption is that common practices in university-based education such as lectures and text-based seminars are insufficient to meet new demands. For instance, it is argued that such practices rest on a ‘transmission view’ of knowledge and learning that does not account for the learners’ engagement and sense-making, that limited support and feedback is offered during the learning process, and that there is too much focus on what is taught by lecturers rather than what is learned by the students. Whilst the pedagogical approaches used will vary extensively between knowledge domains and institutions, and teachers seem increasingly eager to engage in developing course activities and learning environments, these notions provide the ground for a student-centred terminology that defines itself in contrast to teacher-centred or content-centred approaches.

Despite the many actors embracing a student-centred terminology—and likely an effect of their diversity—concepts are often used in different, imprecise ways. For example, ‘student-centred learning’ might be used when one is actually talking about approaches to teaching or features of course design. From a pedagogical perspective, it is important to keep different processes and phenomena analytically apart for the sake of understanding how they can support each other. Thus, we should insist on separating learning from teaching, and learning processes from learning activities, even if it is the productive intersection of these processes we aim at supporting. Moreover, rather than learning itself being student-centred or active, student-centeredness should be viewed as characteristics of the learning environment and of ways of engaging students in courses and activities (Damsa & de Lange, 2019).