Dr Anisha Fernando is a Lecturer in Information Systems at UniSA STEM. Her teaching has been recognised through a Senior Fellowship of the Higher Education Academy (SFHEA), which measures teaching and learning efforts in higher education against the UK Professional Standards Framework. She coordinates and teaches a first-year undergraduate course in IT with a large diverse cohort of students, INFT 1016 IT Fundamentals. She also coordinates and teaches postgraduate courses in information systems like INFS 5093 Business Systems Analysis in SP2 and INFS 5108 Business Process Modelling in SP5. She was part of the team who received a 2024 Unstoppable Teaching Support Award for improving engagement, learning experiences and retention levels of students in undergraduate IT programs. She strives to create meaningful learning experiences for students in their learning journey.
Her research explores technology ethics (specifically privacy and data ethics), the design of information systems and the social impact of emerging technologies. Her doctoral thesis applied value sensitive design, and explored privacy expectations and data flows in the context of personalised search. She also co-leads a scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL) project to progress the development of a value sensitive design-based learning tool to improve ethical professionalism and data literacy among students, having received a UniSA Unstoppable Teaching and Learning (2025-2026) grant.
She is a member of the Australian Computer Society's Professional Ethics Committee and was a co-convener of a community-based AI Ethics Book Club.