This book represents the emerging efforts of a growing international network of researchers and practitioners to promote the development and uptake of evidence-based pedagogies in higher education, at something a level approaching large-scale impact. By offering a communication venue that attracts and enhances much needed partnerships among practitioners and researchers in pedagogical innovation, we aim to change the conversation and focus on how we work and learn together – i.e. extending the implementation and knowledge of co–design methods. In this first edition of our Research Topic on Active Learning, we highlight two (of the three) types of publications we wish to promote. First are studies aimed at understanding the pedagogical designs developed by practitioners in their own practices by bringing to bear the theoretical lenses developed and tested in the education research community. These types of studies constitute the "practice pull" that we see as a necessary counterbalance to "knowledge push" in a more productive pedagogical innovation ecosystem based on research-practitioner partnerships. Second are studies empirically examining the implementations of evidence-based designs in naturalistic settings and under naturalistic conditions. Interestingly, the teams conducting these studies are already exemplars of partnerships between researchers and practitioners who are uniquely positioned as “in-betweens” straddling the two worlds. As a result, these publications represent both the rigours of research and the pragmatism of reflective practice. In forthcoming editions, we will add to this collection a third type of publication -- design profiles. These will present practitioner-developed pedagogical designs at varying levels of abstraction to be held to scrutiny amongst practitioners, instructional designers and researchers alike. We hope by bringing these types of studies together in an open access format that we may contribute to the development of new forms of practitioner-researcher interactions that promote co-design in pedagogical innovation.