Access to AI-driven chatbots is triggering schools to transform. Easy access and questions of cheating are balanced against potential upsides of individual support, time savings, and the risk of falling behind. Therefore, insights into teachers’ AI self-efficacy and attitudes towards the integration of AI-driven chatbots in education necessitate research. This study approaches teachers' readiness to use AI-driven chatbots. A survey and poll questions were administered, yielding 312 and 406 responses respectively, focusing on AI self-efficacy, attitudes, and perceived usefulness in education. Preliminary findings show that while teachers are generally positive about the potential of AI in education, their AI self-efficacy varies significantly based on prior use of the technology, perceived relevance, and the support available to them. The study highlights the need for internal support and targeted professional development interventions and offers practical insights for policymakers, educators, and curriculum developers to foster teacher readiness and competence in using AI-driven chatbots in their professional tasks, in and outside of class © 2025 The Authors.

Hur kan vi skapa ett långsiktigt och hållbart pedagogiskt utvecklingsarbete för studenters lärande och för en högre utbildning som håller hög kvalitet? Denna fråga blev aktuell efter att Universitetskanslersämbetet (UKÄ, u.å.) lyfte vikten av att skapa ett varaktigt kretslopp för det pedagogiska utvecklingsarbetet vid landets lärosäten. Som ett led i detta ville vi utforska frågan hur vi kan ta tillvara det kreativa och innovativa arbetet kring pedagogisk utveckling på enskilda lärosäten. I en efterföljande artikel (Nygren & Sjöberg, 2022) lyfte vi fram fyra aspekter som vi menar att ett pedagogiskt utvecklingsarbete behöver rymma för att åstadkomma ett varaktigt kretslopp: systematik, kultur, delaktighet och tillit. Vi betonade samtidigt att utvecklingsarbetet bör vara en integrerad del av kvalitetsarbetet och att detta, det pedagogiska kvalitetsarbetet, måste ses som ett gemensamt ansvar – från den individuella läraren på mikronivå, till kollektivet på institutionen på mellannivån och slutligen till den strategiska nivån, som är kopplad till pedagogisk meritering och pedagogisk skicklighet. I denna uppföljande artikel tittar vi, två pedagogiska utvecklare och två ledare på mellannivån, närmare på aspekten tillit och resonerar kring den roll tillit spelar i det pedagogiska kvalitetsarbetet. Detta gör vi genom att presentera goda exempel på tillitsbaserade samarbeten mellan pedagogiska utvecklare och ledare på mellannivån. Vi vill med dessa exempel visa en möjlig väg framåt för att skapa ett långsiktigt och hållbart pedagogiskt utvecklingsarbete. © 2024 The author(s).

Student well-being is important for inclusive societies and academic achievement. As studies have shown, well-being is associated with school success. Today, it’s common for schools to use different technologies to collect and analyse digital data with the purpose of improving educational outcomes. Generally, this collected data focus on student engagement, attendance, and results, with novel advancements being aimed at supporting student well-being. In this pilot study, we analyse teachers’ experiences to identify benefits and challenges during a spearhead integration of a data-driven tool for examining student well-being in upper secondary school. Using thematic analysis of teacher interview transcripts, we identified four themes: insight diversity, caring pedagogies, teacher leadership tools, and faculty transformation. The themes are discussed using the theoretical perspectives of orchestration, practice, process, and actors. Key results show that some high-value benefits teachers report on are gaining insights, saving time, and informing decision-making. The challenges include a lack of systematisation, guidance, and resources, and tensions related to defining the role and responsibilities of a teacher or mentor. We conclude that schools that work to support student well-being can benefit from the diversity of insights and practices related to the presented tool. However, an informed and systematic approach would be needed to leverage the benefit of spearhead integration. The contribution of the study is to provide insights on how a well-being tool can be used in an educational context to bring understanding of student well-being to teachers. Our results may inform decisions and guide integration and implementation practices in schools.

Educational outcomes are heavily reliant on student engagement, yet this concept is complex and subject to diverse interpretations. The intricacy of the issue arises from the broad spectrum of interpretations, each contributing to the understanding of student engagement as both complex and multifaceted. Given the emergence and increasing use of Learning Analytics (LA) within higher education to provide enhanced insight into engagement, research is needed to understand how engagement is conceptualised by LA researchers and what dimensions and indicators of engagement are captured by studies that use log data. This systematic review synthesises primary research indexed in the Web of Science, Scopus, ProQuest, A + Education, and SAGE journals or captured through snowballing in OpenAlex. Studies were included if they were published between 2011 and 2023, were journal articles or conference papers and explicitly focused on LA and engagement or disengagement within formal higher education settings. 159 studies were included for data extraction within EPPI Reviewer. The findings reveal that LA research overwhelmingly approaches engagement using observable behavioural engagement measures, such as clicks and task duration, with very few studies exploring multiple dimensions of engagement. Ongoing issues with methodological reporting quality were identified, including a lack of detailed contextual information, and recommendations for future research and practice are provided. © The Author(s) 2024.

In contemporary society, digital competence has become increasingly important for people in everyday life as well as in working life. Hence, it is vital that today’s higher education contain an appropriate degree of digitization both in terms of content and approaches, something which is particularly important in higher education, where there is a pronounced expectation of what one should be able to handle in terms of digitization when one enters the workplace. Drawing on insights from previous research, this study seeks to explore the integration of digital elements in higher education pedagogy via students’ perceptions of digital integration in their education and evaluate their assessments of teachers’ digital competence. Special attention is given to collaborative learning practices facilitated by digital technologies. The research questions posed to guide the aim are: How do university students perceive the integration of digital elements within their education, and what are their assessments of their teachers’ digital competence in utilizing these technologies? The results show that teachers’ digital competence varies across disciplines which might influence their utilization of digital pedagogical methods and tools. Moreover, both engineering and non-engineering students reported varying levels of usage of digital collaborative learning methods which might reflect discipline-specific preferences and practices in collaborative learning. Also, despite high confidence levels in using digital tools, students exhibited limited awareness of existing digital functionalities. These results seek to inform pedagogical practices, institutional policies, and professional development initiatives to cultivate a digitally proficient educator workforce and have relevance globally for all involved in teaching and learning in higher education.

This article presents a Swedish study on the potential of technology to transform teaching and learning practices in higher education. Sweden is at the forefront of technological innovation and digitalization and when it comes to technology in education this is not an exception. Technology Enhanced Learning (TEL) has emerged as an important pedagogical aspect within higher education in recent years. The term TEL is used to demonstrate teaching experiences that intend to improve such support. Previous research has recognized bottom-up initiatives from academic staff with specialists in technology often addressed by individual enthusiasts. Also, most internal processes regarding digitalization are identified as top-down initiatives driven by policy rather than influenced teachers. Hence, the main aim of this study is to analyse academic teachers´ experiences with digital technologies that support students’ learning in higher education. To support this aim, following research questions are posed: 1) What factors facilitate TEL in teaching in higher education and why? 2) What factors limit TEL in higher education and why? Focus group interviews with 36 academic teachers from two Swedish universities were conducted. Results show that on the one hand teachers experience both benefits and limitations with TEL. On the other hand, important organisational aspects of using TEL are highlighted. The choices that academic teachers face and give expression to do not appear to be a matter of individual choice or stance in teaching situations. These results have relevance globally for all involved in teaching and learning in higher education. © 2023 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.

Socio-technical imaginaries of preservice teachers are an important area of inquiry that warrants exploration, partly because teachers need to be prepared for teaching in a digital society and partly because they will enter schools and influence education in their own right. In this paper, we examine the socio-technical imaginations of pre-service teachers in relation to future assessments in education. Socio-technical imaginaries reflect values and priorities and play a significant role in fostering agency and ownership in meeting and managing the development of future practices, thus contributing to a higher quality of education and professional development. Pre-service teachers (n=21) were instructed to write journal reflections and narratives during a speculative future intervention as part of a teacher training programme. In this study, we sought to explore how pre-service teachers perceive the role of technology in shaping future educational assessment practices. The data was analysed using thematic analysis and discussed through the lens of Information Systems Artefact. The findings indicate both teacher scepticism and robust agency as digital innovations emerge in the learning landscape. This paper will be valuable for stakeholders aiming to promote responsible digitalisation, educators, and educational researchers interested in understanding and adapting to the evolving landscape of technology in education.

Higher education (HE) today is a diversified area which has grown expansively in response to a rapidly changing educational and political climate over the past decades. In this age of complexity, development and change are omnipresent and intrinsic parts of the university teacher’s practice, from the development of the teachers’individual practice at micro-level to the collaborative development of scholarly practice at the meso-level of the department and to the strategic institutional approach at macro-level, which links to employment and promotion frameworks and the recognitionof teaching quality. As requirements for pedagogical competence have been built into career structures and criteria for promotion, academic developers have become central to the implementation of these strategies. This development goes hand in hand with the shift in focus from quality assurance to quality enhancement, which has extended the range of professional activities for academic developers. The allowing of the universities to develop their own quality assurance systems, signals a heightened awareness of the importance of ownership and the possibility of influencing quality processes, which in turn relates to national governance strategies of teaching and learning. As the changing educational and political demands on higher education have deeply affected the professional activities of the academic developer and the academic teacher, this article addresses the changes and challenges faced. The aim is to discuss these implications particularly for academic development in this diversified context and to contribute with further knowledge and understanding of structural and organizational prerequisites for the advancement of teaching in higher education. © Copyright for this article is retained by the author(s), with first publication rights granted to the journal.

The use of robotics technology in school is renowned for providing children with opportunities to interact and collaborate in various school subjects, which raise questions of how to design learning activities that include robot technology in education. In this paper we explore how a designerly approach can foster children’s perspective-taking while creatively collaborating in mixed analogue and digital learning environments including robots, creative material and classical fairytales. Based on a social semiotics analytical framework, the study draws from workshops carried out with third grade classes of Danish school children, aged 9–10 years old. Using video recordings and a thematic analysis, the unit of analysis focuses on the activities with a special interest on children’s interactions with robots, creative materials, classical fairytales and with each other. The results of this study imply that by using a designerly approach with robotics in programming activities, conditions were created for children to engage in interactions and reasoning with each other, where the mixed learning environment reinforced children’s abilities of perspective-taking. © 2023, ICST Institute for Computer Sciences, Social Informatics and Telecommunications Engineering.