AI and robots have the potential to transform Higher Education (HE) but pose many ethical and implementation challenges. To ensure the widest debate about our choices for the future of HE with these technologies, engaging ways to present the issues are needed and this article is part of an exploration of the potential of fictional narratives to do…

The constructive alignment (CA) of university teaching has received considerable attention from a policy-making perspective, but much less so from a student perspective. Against this background, we explored the relationships between CA and student motivation, and between CA and perceived learning demands. Fifty-six students from two second-year…

The recruitment of doctoral graduates yields collective knowledge, skills, networking, and prestige benefits to organisations, and to UK industries. As individuals though, do graduates experience overall benefit from their doctorate, and how do they perceive the value that engaging with doctoral study confers? This interview study used a critical,…

This study describes an intervention that introduced a period of solving non-routine problems into tertiary STEM lectures. The aim was twofold: to attempt to increase student engagement and to introduce them to the kind of domain-free abstract reasoning that involves critical, creative and innovative thinking. The study involved over 600 STEM…

The purpose of this paper is to discuss both the status of the PhD in South Africa and the feasibility of the country's aspiration to increase by fivefold the production of PhDs by 2025. Based on the first empirical studies on doctoral education in South Africa, it argues that in order to move towards this target, an expanded and coordinated…