There is growing appreciation of the importance of understanding the student perspective in Higher Education (HE) at both institutional and international levels. This is particularly important in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics subjects such as Computer Science (CS) and Engineering in which industry needs are high but so are student dropout rates. An important factor to consider is the management of students’ initial expectations of university study and career. This paper reports on a study of CS first-year students’ expectations across three European countries using qualitative data from student surveys and essays. Expectation is examined from both short-term (topics to be studied) and long-term (career goals) perspectives. Tackling these issues will help paint a picture of computing education through students’ eyes and explore their vision of its and their role in society. It will also help educators prepare students more effectively for university study and to improve the student experience.

This study examines the perspectives of university faculty and staff regarding the influence of artificial intelligence on the higher education teaching and learning landscape following the global launch of free-to-use OpenAI ChatGPT in the autumn of 2022. The participants were 79 university faculty and staff from diverse academic fields across all campuses of a multidisciplinary university in Finland. The data were collected in two phases in May–June 2023 and in March 2024, with focus group interviews and Learning Café discussions. The results showed that AI has a broad impact on teaching and studying in higher education. Six main categories were identified: (1) the impact of AI on students’ learning processes, (2) the impact of AI on teaching, (3) the knowledge required of future employees and the impact of AI on them, (4) ethical and economic issues, (5) the development of AI or its use in the future, and (6) the nature of the change brought about by artificial intelligence. AI is already making inroads into higher education, and participants underscored its dual impact on teaching and learning, highlighting both opportunities and challenges. While teachers recognized AI’s potential to enhance teaching and assessment methods, they also acknowledged the need to adapt their courses accordingly. They expressed concerns about understanding AI’s impact on students’ learning processes and their own contributions to learning assignments. The participants emphasized the necessity of providing support and training for teachers to ensure AI is meaningfully and effectively integrated into teaching and learning practices and landscapes.

We investigated research processes applied in recent publications in the European Journal of Engineering Education (EJEE), exploring how papers link to theoretical work and how research processes have been designed and reported. We analysed all 155 papers published in EJEE in 2009, 2010 and 2013, classifying the papers using a taxonomy of research processes in engineering education research (EER) (Malmi et al. 2012). The majority of the papers presented either empirical work (59%) or were case reports (27%). Our main findings are as follows: (1) EJEE papers build moderately on a wide selection of theoretical work; (2) a great majority of papers have a clear research strategy, but data analysis methods are mostly simple descriptive statistics or simple/undocumented qualitative research methods; and (3) there are significant shortcomings in reporting research questions, methodology and limitations of studies. Our findings are consistent with and extend analyses of EER papers in other publishing venues; they help to build a clearer picture of the research currently published in EJEE and allow us to make recommendations for consideration by the editorial team of the journal. Our employed procedure also provides a framework that can be applied to monitor future global evolution of this and other EER journals.

Use of theory within a field of research provides the foundation for designing effective research programs and establishing a deeper understanding of the results obtained. This, together with the emergence of domain-specific theory, is often taken as an indicator of the maturity of any research area. This article explores the development and subsequent usage of domain-specific theories and theoretical constructs (TCs) in computing education research (CER). All TCs found in 878 papers published in three major CER publication venues over the period 2005–2020 were identified and assessed to determine the nature and purpose of the constructs found. We focused more closely on areas related to learning, studying, and progression, where our analysis found 80 new TCs that had been developed, based on multiple epistemological perspectives. Several existing frameworks were used to categorize the areas of CER focus in which TCs were found, the methodology by which they were developed, and the nature and purpose of the TCs. A citation analysis was undertaken, with 1,727 citing papers accessed to determine to what extent and in what ways TCs had been used and developed to inform subsequent work, also considering whether these aspects vary according to different focus areas within computing education. We noted which TCs were used most often and least often, and we present several brief case studies that demonstrate progressive development of domain-specific theory. The exploration provides insights into trends in theory development and suggests areas in which further work might be called for. Our findings indicate a general interest in the development of TCs during the period studied, and we show examples of how different approaches to theory development have been used. We present a framework suggesting how strategies for developing new TCs in CER might be structured and discuss the nature of theory development in relation to the field of CER.

The study examines the benefits of digital tools in teaching and learning as experienced by university teachers in two different time periods: 1) during the controlled digital leap before the Covid-19 pandemic (2017–2019) and 2) during the emergency imposition of remote teaching in response to the lockdown aimed at containing the Covid-19 pandemic (2020). Teachers in different academic fields at a large multidisciplinary Finnish university (N1 = 303 and N2 = 265) responded to two open-ended questions as part of a broader questionnaire. The research identified four kinds of benefits related to digital teaching: (1) practical and administrative and (2) independence of time and place, implying practical and technical benefits; as well as (3) enhancing learning and (4) developing teaching, which are primarily pedagogical benefits, related to teaching and learning. Voluntary and forced digital leaps provided different kinds of consequences in teaching and learning. Digital tools generally provided practical and technological benefits for teaching and learning during the controlled digital leap, but they also had positive pedagogical effects. The forced digital leap, in turn, demonstrated the value of time-and-place-independent online teaching and learning. It also exposed differences among academic fields in how teachers experienced the benefits of using digital tools. Support of and training for university teachers should take into account the different needs of faculties and disciplines, and promote dialogue between pedagogical and technological interests.

Purpose: The study aims to investigate the state of higher education (HE) leadership research after the intensified focus on teaching and learning (TL) in academia.Design/methodology/approach: The authors clarify the use of key concepts in English-medium empirical journal articles published between 2017 and 2021 by analysing 64 publications through qualitative content analysis.Findings: The analysed papers on leadership of TL in HE activate a number of concepts, the commonest concepts being academic leadership, distributed leadership, educational leadership, transformational leadership, leadership and transformative leadership. Even if the papers highlight partly overlapping aspects of leadership, the study finds a rationale for the use of several concepts in the HE context. Contrary to the expectation raised in earlier scholarship, no holistic framework evolves from within the recent research to reveal the contribution that leadership of TL makes to leadership in HE generally.Research limitations/implications: Limitations: Nearly 40 per cent of the analysed articles are from the United States of America (USA), United Kingdom (UK), Australia and Canada, which leaves large areas of the world aside. Implications: The found geographical incoherence might be remediated and the research of leadership of TL in HE generally led forward by widening the cultural and situational diversity in the field.Originality/value: This research contributes to an enhanced understanding of the field of leadership in TL in HE in that it frames the concepts used in recent research and makes the differences, similarities and rationale between concepts visible.