Fostering agency as a core component of professionalism is seen as a critical task of higher education. However, the tools for assessing university students’ agency, and the pedagogical and relational resources needed for its development, are lacking. The present study describes the theoretical foundations and factor structure of the newly developed Agency of University Students (AUS) Scale, which assesses students’ course-specific agency. In the factor analysis, 10 factors emerged. Four of these – Interest and motivation, Self-efficacy, Competence beliefs and Participation activity – are seen to represent individual resources of agency. The other four factors – Equal treatment, Teacher support, Peer support and Trust – represent relational sources of agency. Finally, Opportunities to influence and Opportunities to make choices represent contextual sources of agency. The psychometric properties and uses of the scale are discussed.

This paper presents a novel approach and a method of learning analytics to study student agency in higher education. Agency is a concept that holistically depicts important constituents of intentional, purposeful, and meaningful learning. Within workplace learning research, agency is seen at the core of expertise. However, in the higher education field, agency is an empirically less studied phenomenon with also lacking coherent conceptual base. Furthermore, tools for students and teachers need to be developed to support learners in their agency construction. We study student agency as a multidimensional phenomenon centring on student-experienced resources of their agency. We call the analytics process developed here student agency analytics, referring to the application of learning analytics methods for data on student agency collected using a validated instrument. The data are analysed with unsupervised and supervised methods. The whole analytics process will be automated using microservice architecture. We provide empirical characterisations of student-perceived agency resources by applying the analytics process in two university courses. Finally, we discuss the possibilities of using agency analytics in supporting students to recognise their resources for agentic learning and consider contributions of agency analytics to improve academic advising and teachers' pedagogical knowledge.

This article examines how Finnish universities and other higher education institutes have responded to the challenges posed by rapid changes in the world of work and societies all over Europe, particularly with reference to the development of generic skills. The data were collected by means of individual and group interviews at three Finnish higher education institutes, including two universities and one university of applied sciences. The interviews involved 63 persons in charge of management, development and teaching at these institutes. As a result of the qualitative data analysis, we distinguished four models to represent the development of generic skills, which we named (1) Specialist Model, (2) Science-based Renewal Model, (3) Project-based Integrative Model, and (4) Model of Networked Culture. These models serve as analytical tools that help higher education institutes to examine their existing practices and to develop new ones.

Higher education calls for reform, but deeper knowledge about the prerequisites for teaching development and pedagogical change is missing. In this study, 51 university teachers’ experiences of supportive or constraining factors in teaching development were investigated in the context of Finland’s multidisciplinary network. The findings reveal that the supportive factors in teaching development arise from the nature of the development itself, i.e. from the teachers’ opportunities to act as active agents in an authentic development process. Furthermore, the circumstances of the development also play essential roles (both constraining and supportive) in teaching development. Such support, at its best, will come when teachers and others view teaching development in the university context as being valuable and rewarding, and when teachers are encouraged by management and are supplemented with the necessary equipment, tools, and networks they need to do their job. Increasing interaction between the institutional levels can make educational development successful.