The higher education sector is constantly pivoting towards innovation and adopting new strategies to improve education delivery. Active learning is at the centre of various teaching approaches that focus on the increasing participation of the students in their own learning process. While it is becoming a widespread strategy in higher education, its adoption remains limited and it continues to be surrounded by some uncertainty, in particular at the level of its design and effectiveness. This paper aims to examine the viewpoints of university lecturers with concern to active learning′s design and instructional impact measurement, which were collected in a two-phase research strategy combining an online questionnaire and semi-structured interviews. The findings portray active learning as a valuable teaching strategy and enable the proposition of an assortment of design guidelines, as well as recommendations for measuring the instructional impact of active learning initiatives that can contribute to a more fruitful implementation.