In honours programmes, teachers face the task of designing courses in which students feel challenged and learn from accomplishing demanding assignments. The aim of this study was to investigate students' and teachers' perceptions of challenge and learning in an honours programme. From 2016 to 2019, students and teachers rated the learning…

In a world in need of profound change, the importance of "transformative education" is increasingly recognized. However, barriers abound in our Higher Education Institutions, including that educators often have little notion of "how" to make their teaching more transformative "in practice." This paper builds on our…

The importance of reflection during learning process is widely recognized. Drawing on the literature, this article presents a study where students were stimulated to reflect during experiential learning, in order to both re- and de- contextualize their knowledge. We describe how different levels of prompted reflection can be related to academic…

Intercultural group work (IGW) is a valuable learning strategy to enhance deep learning and prepare university students to participate in a globalized world, so more insight is needed into what motivates students to engage actively in IGW. Using an expectancy-value theory framework, this study investigates the extent to which the different…

When analyzing student reflection assignments from a mandatory research methods course, the authors were struck by the tension between students' own approaches to learning and the challenges, uncertainties, and frustrations accompanying their efforts. Students' ideas about what constitutes learning, how learning is to be done, and how they…

This paper presents the first experiences of the use of an online open-source repository with programming exercises. The repository is independent of any specific teaching approach. Students can search for and select an exercise that trains the programming concepts that they want to train and that only uses the programming concepts they already…

Students' learning environments often change during school career, due to school transitions and the introduction of educational innovations, causing discontinuity in teaching and learning. Success of students entering a new learning environment depends in part on their prior expectations of education, as these influence later perceptions.…

This paper addresses the potential of online environments as spaces for young people to develop intercultural competences by studying how otherness is created online and how this holds potential for learning. While online communication is an increasing part of young peoples' lives, not much is known about how young people use their online social…

The construct of critical cultural awareness (CCA) is often regarded as an element pertaining to intercultural communicative competence (Byram, 1997, 2021). In this model, CCA is defined as the ability to "evaluate, critically, and on the basis of a systematic process of reasoning, values in one's own culture and other cultures" (Byram,…

Many large-scale, school-based interventions have attempted to improve academic performance through promoting students' growth mindset, defined as the belief that one's intellectual ability can increase with practice and time. However, most have shown weak to no effects. Thus, it is important to examine how growth mindset might affect retention…

Purpose: This empirical study aims to demonstrate how the combination of trace data derived from technology-enhanced learning environments and self-response survey data can contribute to the investigation of self-regulated learning processes. Design/methodology/approach: Using a showcase based on 1,027 students' learning in a blended introductory…

For decades, self-report instruments -- which rely heavily on students' perceptions and beliefs -- have been the dominant way of measuring motivation and strategy use. Event-based measures based on online trace data arguably has the potential to remove analytical restrictions of self-report measures. The purpose of this study is therefore to…

Higher education aims for deep learning and increasingly uses a specific form of online education: Small Private Online Courses (SPOCs). To overcome challenges that instructors face in order to promote deep learning through that format, the use of feedback may have significant potential. We interviewed eleven instructors and four students and…

Despite the potential of social networks in formal learning, there should be more knowledge on the students and teachers attitudes toward such technology and more recent information in the context of the actual educational situation. The Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) was used. The instruments included a questionnaire investigate the attitudes…

How do (potential) students differ in their preferences for the organization of online and distance courses and programs, can these differences be grouped into preference profiles, and are there any associations between these profiles and variables, such as achievement and dropout, that are relevant for the promotion and design of online and…