Mirjam Sophia Glessmer

In the featured image above, you see water shooting out from underneath the bridge; down from a slightly raised reservoir upstream, over the weir, towards the sea.

In the context of mental health and higher education, who has a duty to care and what does care even mean? Byrom et al. (2026), in “Responsibility and other dangerous ideas: who cares, who can, and who should in higher education“, distinguish three ways to approach care:

Suter et al. (2026) argue that given the urgent need for action against climate change (and seeing that pretty much all available research shows that it doesn’t influence researchers’ reputation or credibility to be activists and scientists, those are not excuses!), more people should combine activism with at the same time figuring out what works.

In the preprint “How AI impacts skill formation” by Shen & Tamkin (2026), study participants are learning a new Python library either in a control condition or with an “AI assistant”, and researchers observe how the participants prompt AI during learning and measure completion times and quiz scores after learning. They find that “AI-enhanced productivity […]

I see statistics on social media every day about 1 in 3 young people who say that there are topics they talk about with an AI but not with another human. And almost all our students report that they use AI for learning, because they aren’t being judged, they don’t feel like they are bothering […]

How do we teach for sustainability when the class is huge and there is a lot of content to be covered? One really nice example is described by Monger (2022), who is “teaching oceanography by engaging students in civic activism“.

My friend Torge (who I had a super exciting rotating tank experiment project with, “Dry Theory 2 Juicy Reality“, check it out!), sent me the picture above and asked whether I had any idea what was happening there. I had not. But I had to find out! (Sorry to everybody else who wanted something from […]

We want new engaging web content for the Inclusive LU project, and I wanted to try how easy it really is to use AI for coding (turns out: very!), so I have built a page that — at first glance — looks exactly like this post, but when you hover different sections, things start happening. […]

When browsing Zeivots et al. (2026)’s article “Assessment design through co-design: reimagining assessment design practices in higher education“, one sentence caught my eye: “Students could see how their input mattered without the expectation that every suggestion would be enacted“. Since I am currently really interested in partnership and negotiations there, I then had to read […]

This morning, I ran a workshop for university teachers called “Teaching for Sustainability: Practicing for a sustainable future through sustainable pedagogies“. You can look at all the slides here, or see some of them below together with a quick summary of what I said about them. Most of what I am writing below I have written […]

Intriguing title! Lodge et al. (2023) discuss a “quadrant typology of human and machine interactions for education” with the two axes individual-to-collaborative and extending-to-offloading. Calculators fall into “cognitive offloading“, meaning it’s individual and offloading.

I have been thinking a lot about what platform to host our MOOC on and how that decision locks us into a lot of things, for example to certify completion of the course and with that requirements to use quizzes and peer-review, but also more generally the ways in which participants can interact, can navigate […]

I keep coming back to Karen Costa’s question “What if the critical #AI skill for our era is not how to use it, but how to resist it?” In the Poulidis et al. (2025) chess study, 40% of those who learned with AI and could press a button to get help said that in hypothetical […]

Let’s read about everybody’s favourite topic: The polycrisis! Here, I am summarizing a framework that takes “polycrisis” from buzzword to useful concept.

I am still on the “tyranny of participation” trip, this time reading about students’ experiences in peer discussions and inequities in roles that students take on in those discussions. Generally, we assume that students learn through peer discussions, but we also know that not all students learn equally in that format. What are the barriers […]

Usually we like to think that self-regulation in feedback seeking and learning is a good thing: When students get stuck, they can ask for support that helps them overcome the difficulty and continue learning. This can become problematic, though, when students ask for hints too early and often, get used to that behaviour, and then […]

This is one of these texts that I wish I had known earlier: to give to students to help them understand their learning, but also to teachers as a super easy introduction to how to think about difficulties in learning: “Making things hard on yourself, but in a good way: Creating desirable difficulties to enhance […]

Initially, we were very excited to have the opportunity to produce a MOOC to be run on one of the biggest course platforms in the world — to gain visibility and status through being hosted there, to be able to use a platform that handles participant accounts and automated certification through quizzes and rubric-based peer-assessment, […]

Innovation seems to still be one of the favourite buzzwords around, and in teaching, it often means fancier technology, larger group sizes that purportedly have even better learning outcomes, and all of that, of course, based in evidence showing typically large numbers of some sort. In this framing, Thirkell (2026) writes, “[p]edagogical innovation risks becoming […]

As I am thinking more and more about the details of our upcoming MOOC on “Teaching for Sustainability”, I am less and less convinced that I actually want to have automated certification at the end. So Emerson (2026) on ““It Honestly Made Me Want to Work Harder”: Student Evaluation of Using Ungrading in an Online Asynchronous […]