This study investigates the relationship between first-year higher education students' (N = 405) approaches to learning and academic performance on engineering mathematics courses. In addition, we study what combinations of approaches to learning students apply, how these combinations change over time, and whether they are linked to the…

Many studies have shown that the shift from contact teaching to fully online teaching has had many negative effects on teaching and learning during the COVID-19 pandemic. Although the pandemic has also had an effect on leading teaching in higher education institutions, there has not been much empirical research on leaders' experiences during a…

Referring to failures in policy-driven public governance research this paper looks at strategising in higher education. It expands horizons for understanding university strategies in a more nuanced way than hitherto has been done. Deploying systems theory, it shows how different temporalities co-exist in strategies and how their change reflects…

International students are at risk of burnout during their studies and face challenges in their writing. This study explores the burnout and self-efficacy profiles of international students and how these profiles differ in writing conceptions. Participants were 162 international students at a research-intensive Finnish university. They completed…

Over the past decade, co-supervision of PhD candidates has become increasingly common across the disciplines. However, co-supervision has been explored previously primarily from the candidates' viewpoint and in small-scale qualitative studies. We have extended the research by examining co-supervisory experience from the supervisor's perspective,…

Supervision is one of the most important determinants of a successful doctoral process. However, there have been few large-scale survey studies on the development of PhD supervisors. In this study, doctoral supervisors' perceptions of their supervisory competence, professional development activities and professional support from the research…

Teachers' conceptions of teaching play a key role in the pedagogical practices they apply in their teaching. Previous studies of conceptions of teaching generic skills have been mainly qualitative with small samples, and thus there is a need for a more extensive quantitative study. This study investigates the associations between higher education…

The aim of this study was to explore knowledge in the context of creating a shared curriculum between research-intensive and vocationally oriented universities of applied sciences. Curriculum knowledge was explored from the accounts of 26 teachers from four institutions in Finland. Shared curriculum initiatives created an environment in which…

In this article, we examine the linkage between students' game-playing motivations and a wide variety of gamification elements within higher marketing education. Using an interpretive and convergent mixed-methods design, we discover four clusters of students that vary in terms of their game-motivational bases and views on gamification elements.…

Universities of applied sciences (UAS) have a strong mandate to carry out research, development and innovation (RDI) activities in collaboration with local stakeholders. Geographical proximity is one of the key factors for the creation and success of RDI activities because of the positive balance between costs and benefits of local knowledge…

Purpose: Universities strategically organize themselves around sustainability, including transformative goals in teaching and learning. Simultaneously, the role of online education has become more prominent. This study aims to better understand the purpose and process of creating online sustainability education (OSE) and to identify challenges and…

Universities worldwide are beginning to counter the prevailing neo-liberal ideology by paying renewed attention to the moral development of students and fostering their life purposes. This mixed methods study investigates the life purposes of higher education students in four institutions in the Netherlands (n[subscript Dutch] = 663) and Finland…

The purpose of this study was to extend an understanding of success experienced by leaders in teaching development units. Using a framework comprised of narratives of constraint, this qualitative study interviewed 38 academics in leadership roles from Finland, Australia, Sweden, Norway, the United States, Canada, Scotland, and England. Findings…

Purpose: This study aims to assess higher education students' interest in learning sustainability competencies and their pro-ecological worldviews at a large research-intensive university in Finland to provide a background information for developing a sustainability science course. Design/methodology/approach: In total, 797 students participated…

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…