While interdisciplinarity has been widely addressed in higher education policies and university strategies across countries, universities and colleges are struggling with the implementation at the programme level. For instance, extant literature implies many barriers to establishing interdisciplinary degree programmes (IDPs). However, there is a…

Lecturers who are actively engaged in shaping their teaching and teaching practices demonstrate agency. Teacher agency has increasingly been described as a key factor in educational development at universities. Lecturers are expected to innovatively develop courses and continuously improve their teaching practices to respond to, for example,…

This study contributes to the research field of entrepreneurship education by providing a new perspective that combines concepts of the entrepreneurial teacher, entrepreneurial teaching methods and the development of entrepreneurial competences in students. As being entrepreneurial in the teaching context can be explored from various angles, the…

Purpose: This study aims to determine how sustainable development (SD) demands (according to the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe's (UNECE) SD themes from 2005) are connected to the contents of education, research, development and innovation (RDI) in higher education institutions (HEI). Education and the RDI nexus may affect HEI's…

As higher education quality assurance in many countries in Europe has become a mature activity, some agencies carrying out external quality assurance are developing beyond their core tasks and missions. The current study identifies new tasks taken up within quality assurance agencies and analyses the drivers behind such development. Based on an…

The managerial transformation of higher education often means implementing novel modes of teaching and learning, including experiential and collaborative teaching. University teachers' agency is crucial for managing and enacting changes in higher education. Collaborating as part of these changes requires a specific kind of agency, namely…

This work addresses the importance of innovation in entrepreneurial and business education to ensure that students develop the ability to make complex decisions and solve complex challenges. The intention was to incorporate the complexity theory in decision-making and problem-solving in business and entrepreneurship. To achieve this, we present…

User-centricity and usability are a premise of digitalization, a current trend for business model innovation based on advanced digital technologies. The article addresses a gap in the literature, in which descriptions of the cases of updating university curricula in usability are lacking. This gap also exists in the practice. The study uses the…

Why is invention strongly positively correlated with parental income not only in the US but also in Finland which displays low income inequality and high social mobility? Using data on 1.45M Finnish individuals and their parents, we find that: (i) the positive association between parental income and off-spring probability of inventing is greatly…

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…

Over the past 9 years, we have implemented, developed, and refined a novel student-centered teaching method called Extreme Apprenticeship in university mathematics context. In this paper, we report the theoretical orientation behind the method, as well as its practical implementation. We also reflect on our experiences gained from using it in our…

The core theme of this article is the emerging tension between the egalitarian discourse that increases the general aspiration of people to become more educated and actual admission constraints. A desire to attend a university and not being allowed to (i.e. non-admittance) is a loss that can potentially result in an anomic condition. Anomie theory…

The purpose of this study is to determine the direction of causality between the quality of education and technological development for the selected Northern European countries over the period 2006-2017. To this end, we employ the bootstrap panel causality test. The findings of our study indicate that the quality of education leads to changes in…

This article urges a reconsideration of professional responsibility in arts education, moving beyond an emphasis on narrow technical expertise and strict disciplinary boundaries in order to respond to the needs of complex late modern society. We reconsider 'professionalism' in arts education as a site of struggle that requires 'systems…

The purpose of this study was to understand the factors behind university teachers' ability to implement instructional changes during the COVID-19 pandemic. An online questionnaire comprised of open-ended and Likert-scale questions was administered to teachers at a Finnish university in April 2020. The sample consisted of 378 university teachers…