27 curious teachers joined Ola Leifler‘s demonstration of large-scale social simulations (“Megagames”) yesterday. Can you imagine playing a game with 180 people in individual roles for a full day? Me not really, but at least a little bit more after yesterday’s demonstration. On the image above you see part of the setup: There were three […]
Cheating is not a new phenomenon by any means, but with the raise of GenAI, it seems to be easier than ever, and teachers seem to be more suspicious than ever. But in contrast to direct plagiarism where a source can easily be identified, the use of GenAI to produce text in assignments can mostly […]
As I am writing the summary of the second part of “becoming an everyday changemaker” (summary of Part I here), I am trying to apply what I am reading, and intellectually agreeing with, to my life. Habits are so hard to break… Anyway, I have known for a long time that cold dipping and swimming […]
What is the purpose of education? In the midst of preparing classes, giving classes, reading student work, giving feedback, assessing, we don’t often enough stop and think about why we are really doing all of this. Yesterday, I did have the chance to discuss the purpose of education for a while with colleagues, though, and […]
A good relationship between teachers and students helps students learn better, but it is very unclear what exactly makes a good relationship. Is it trust as we recently investigated, or is it a feeling of belonging, or is it care, or all of it, or something else? Nobody knows right now, and it gets even […]
One way to help students engage with what they value and believe themselves, and how values and beliefs and interests influence what positions people take, might be setting up a role play, where students take on roles that they might find themselves in in the future. I do not have a lot of experiences with […]
I just read this really interesting and important article about “assessment for inclusion, which seeks to ensure diverse students are not disadvantaged through assessment practices” by Tai et al. (2022). Traditional assessment practices often discriminates against people in so many different ways that I had not really carefully considered before.
The “jigsaw method” is used for cooperative learning (and Anja Møgelvang explains here what that is). In a nutshell, let’s say we have a group of 25 students. We can split them into 5 groups à 5 students each. That is their home group, that they sit at one group table with for the duration […]
In “Emerging learning environments in engineering education” by Hadgraft & Kolmos (2020), which my colleague recommended I read, the authors state that “engineering institutions might be falling behind in re-thinking the entire curriculum for educating students to handle complex situations. Most commonly, changes are made at the single course level which leads to a lack […]
When Rachel writes she agrees that an article is brilliant and important and a ’must read’ for anyone in higher ed involved in/concerned about academic integrity and assessment security, guess I have to read it…
I have written about this, my current favourite book, repeatedly before, while I was reading it for the first time (blog post 1, 2, and 3), but here comes a slightly more deliberate summary for the purpose of a book club that will run from now until summer, with three meetings to discuss the three […]
“Teaching Analysis Polls” are a very useful method to get formative, constructive feedback from a whole class. An external facilitator comes in and structures an approximately 30 minute long discussion without the instructor, who is later informed about the points that the students agreed on were most relevant to convey. In Kordts et al. (2025) […]
In many studies, student attendance of scheduled teaching activities has been found to correlate with student success. However, attendance pattern got majorly disrupted with the Covid-19 pandemic, and seem to not have gone back to “normal” levels and even declining, and many teachers perceive this as a bad sign. At the same time, academic achievements […]
In the Introduction to Teaching and Learning course that I teach twice each year, we include a compulsory “individual reflection”, where participants pick an experience they have had in a higher education context, as student or teacher, and reflect on it in the context of the theory they learn during the course. While most participants […]
Back in 2022, I worked on a really cool study on belonging and test anxiety together with the awesome colleagues you see in the featured image: aside from me taking the selfie, from left to right there are Emily Christiansen, Sehoya Cotner, Sarah Hammarlund, and Robin Costello working on coding responses (missing only Kate Kiani […]
Our experience with how students argue in the Climate Fresk serious game is that they often jump to technical solutions to climate change right away and are unwilling to even entertain the thought of any other approach. Someone will invent something, and that will fix everything (false hope that does not lead to action, as […]
After following the journey of my voting letter in the tracking app for more than a week and seeing that it did not make it to Sunday’s election on time, here are some things that give me hope today. First, and importantly, seeing how Kiel, where my letter should have gone, has voted even though […]
“Generous scholarship is an intentional, collegial approach to scholarship that helps to mitigate the sense of isolation and depletion of energy often associated with managerial, production-oriented academic contexts” (Martinovic et al., 2022)
