Purpose: This paper aims to analyze the extent to which education for sustainable development (ESD) training enhances university teachers' professional competence and whether it has the same effect in the digital as in the face-to-face format. Design/methodology/approach: A training concept was developed based on the professional action competence…

In Islamic religious education (IRE), as well as in the context of pedagogical and theological Islamic Studies at universities, Muslim educators, teachers, and learners in Germany and Austria encounter each other in a cultural, religious, theological, and ideological plurality. However, the existing intra-Muslim plurality is often neglected and…

Women in academia are typically outnumbered by men, a phenomenon metaphorically known as "the leaky pipeline." This study contributes by showing a motherhood penalty in the career pipeline at the postdoctoral stage in Germany--that is, during habilitation. Based on CV information and an email survey, the paper examines which factors are…

Longitudinal research on students' interest in higher education showed that interest declines throughout the study program. While researchers reported numerous factors explaining interest on the student level, research on the relationship between the lecturer level and students' interest development is considered scarce. This study aimed to…

Political discourse and policy reforms worldwide have highlighted the importance of promoting the knowledge economy by stimulating academics' societal engagement (ASE). Such narratives partly aim at influencing academics' attitudes and behaviors. Earlier work that has investigated such influence has tended to overlook the development in humanities…

Although professional training or development opportunities can help university academics to expand their competences and implement high quality educational practices, academics differ in the extent to which they engage in such learning opportunities and their resulting learning gains. A theoretical explanation for these differences involves their…

Student--faculty interactions that promote learning are essential contributors to student retention, academic success and satisfaction. But the factors that causally initiate and frame these interactions are not well understood. Only if students evaluate these interactions as positive will they seek them. We conducted a survey experiment with…

Based on the job demands-resources model and role conflict theories, we developed and tested hypotheses to elucidate the consequences that work-to-life and life-to-work conflicts have on job satisfaction and how affective, normative, and continuance professional commitment moderate these relationships. Using data collected from German academics,…

While it has been stressed repeatedly that academics nowadays have come to face extensive pressure, the extent and distribution of pressure to publish and to secure third-party funding has not been systematically investigated on a large scale. Based on the Zurich Survey of Academics, a representative large-scale web survey among academics working…

Living in a competitive world requires teachers to be aware of their potentials and reflect them on their daily practices. Autonomous teachers can think and act on their own rather than sticking to the established patterns. Current studies mostly deal with perceptions about learner autonomy and focus on local environment. However, what teachers…

In this paper, the authors discuss their experiences with ungrading at a small public university in the U.S. and a large public university in Germany. The courses described are Calculus 1 and a content course for pre-service secondary teachers of mathematics. The professors teach differently: one with lecture, the other with inquiry-based…

Purpose: Professional training courses play an important role for higher education instructors and their teaching quality. However, participants strongly differ in how much they learn in these courses. The present study seeks to explain these differences by focusing on attention as a central aspect of their behavioral engagement that can stem from…

In many countries around the world, the number of new doctorate recipients graduating from universities has grown sharply in the past few decades, but the implications of this expansion for the employment situation of doctorate recipients remain largely unexplored in longitudinal studies. In Germany, as in various other countries, the expansion of…

Occupational stress has been constantly rising among academics in universities globally, which affects their health and well-being. Although some studies reviewed occupational stress in academics, there has been less systematic evidence reviewed occupational stress of academic staff through the lens of the Transactional Model of Stress and Coping…

With the increase in the number of online courses being offered, it is important for faculty to be prepared to teach online. In this study, we examine US and German faculty perceptions on their preparedness to teach online based on the perception of importance of teaching online competencies and their efficacy to teach online. We also examine…