Lecturer

Applying emotion science allows us to motivate students and help them focus, pay attention and connect more deeply, says Flower Darby

Shazia Jagot’s life was transformed by the chance to read Chaucer as an undergraduate. It is crucial, she argues, that a new generation of black and ethnic minority students get the same opportunity

Forthcoming policies on ‘low-value courses’ and grade inflation must acknowledge how pandemic will hit graduate prospects and undergraduate preparedness for years to come, says QAA deputy chief executive Vicki Stott

Despite the strong rhetoric currently en vogue, an end to lectures entirely would be an intellectual loss, says Seán Williams

Online teaching has allowed less-confident students, so often female, to create for themselves a space in which to speak, says Madeleine Davies

My student is right to wonder out loud why learning in college must be a forced march rather than a playful adventure, says Gregory Skutches

Universities should partner with students instead of treating them like passive recipients of our superior knowledge, says Simone Buitendijk

Only losers focus on excellent science. Better to cook the books, spin the wheel and trust to cronies, say Robert de Vries and John Jerrim

Legislation is urgently needed to ensure good governance and fair pay and conditions, says Nahid Neazy

Cyberpsychology expert Linda Kaye says it’s crucial that we understand the personal, social and educational implications of the shift to online teaching and learning

THE’s Careers Clinic series brings together the great and good of higher education to answer a burning careers question

Having surveyed thousands of instructors on their lockdown experiences, James T. Walker discusses two key findings and their practical implications

Academic couple Theresa Mercer and Andrew Kythreotis are heading into their third lockdown, along with their kids, but this time the expectations are higher and lessons have been learned

Uneasy bonds between lecturers and education specialists must be strengthened to deliver post-pandemic learning, says Neil Mosley

Metrics rarely reflect how students have addressed their weaknesses, which is itself the most rewarding part of university teaching, says Megan Argo

Calls to redesign curricula for online study ignore how scholars need time and peer support to reinvent courses, says Carole Binns

In their unearthly calm and Dewey Decimal order, university libraries offer the promise of remaking ourselves, says Joe Moran

The past 12 months will live long in the memory, for all the wrong reasons. But as 2020 nears its end amid fairy lights and optimism about vaccines, six academics tell us the bright spots they managed to find amid the gloom – from human connections to elasticated waistbands

Practitioners have a lot to teach students, but the value of research training should not be dismissed lightly, says Sam Christie

Robert Peckham’s faith in the value of his medical humanities training was gravely tested as his father lay in intensive care

Essay mills’ opportunism, preying on student anxiety about online assessment methods, strengthens the case for legislation, says Douglas Blackstock

Pandemic or no pandemic, academics should try to find time for regular rethinking of their curricula and methods, says Jessica Johnson 

Rules requiring students to show their faces during online lessons are misguided, says Mark Heaton

Academics have long grappled with the strains that job scarcity and the mobility imperative impose on their families. But might the experience of mass remote working finally offer a viable solution, asks Jack Grove

THE’s new Careers Clinic series brings together the great and the good of higher education to answer a burning careers question

While eLife is planning to publish only preprints, even it concedes that journal brand still counts for a lot, notes Michael Marinetto

Universities’ ethics oblige them to pay their own interns, so why do they permit their students to work many months for free, asks Sam Scott

Evidence suggests that different personality types are drawn to – and excel at – teaching and research, says John Dreijmanis

Inevitable examples of jargon or poor research are no reason to reject an entire discipline, say Debby Cotton, Elizabeth Cleaver and Dilly Fung

Academics remain wedded to prestige indicators, but peer reviewers may conclude that the journal is profiteering, says Dorothy Bishop

Budget, seen as ‘remarkable commitment’ to education, could be leveraged to improve IT and teaching quality

An Australian university’s attitude towards Rwanda illustrates the West’s failure to treat African academics as equal partners, says Timothy Carey

French scholars, accused of fostering terrorism, fear escalating rhetoric could curtail freedom of research

The movement to ‘decolonise’ university curricula has leaped into the political and educational mainstream in the wake of George Floyd’s death, dividing opinion on campus and beyond. Anna McKie examines how scholars are handling difficult discussions and where the agenda goes next

Most lecturers dread educationalists’ holier-than-thou, discipline-blind invocations of the latest teaching fads, says an anonymous academic

Pledged support for equality must be put into practice on multiple fronts, from syllabi and curricula to advising and recommending, say Chisomo Selemani and Anna Young

It is crucial to adapt teaching methodology to students’ specific cultures and traditions of learning, says Bashir Makhoul

Academics justifiably express disbelief and outrage when librarians inform them that they can’t afford a particular title, says Caroline Ball

Half of regional governors’ dissertations contained copied text, and these plagiarists went on to perform worse in government, research suggests

If we can’t find the narrative forms to make the world real to one another, we risk losing our politics to the fantasists and cynics, says Lyndsey Stonebridge

Linguistic framing of coronavirus on campus by management has dodged a proper assessment of risks to students and staff, writes a UK academic

The popular conception that US academics are uniformly liberal fails to take into account universities’ subject breadth, says John R. Thelin

Some locked-down students have no electricity at home, never mind broadband service, say Abdur Rehman Cheema and Mehvish Riaz

When teachers ignore offensive language, we are complicit in making the classroom unsafe, say Mariangela Palladino and Shalini Sharma

We need to teach all students to listen better, to ask the right questions and to be willing to be wrong, says Anne Houtman

The pandemic has underlined the need for student assessment strategies to adapt to extraordinary circumstances, say Alexander Amigud and David J. Pell 

Discussions about how the UK’s largest pension scheme covers its deficit ought to consider whether all employers and members should pay the same rate, argues Paul Hamilton

The vast majority of university staff and students are hoping that Joe Biden’s predicted win comes to pass in next week’s presidential election. But with the nation’s finances reeling from Covid-19 and its political fabric fraying in the partisan tug of war, how much would really change, asks Paul Basken 

What does it say about our labour culture that a tenured professor stuck in an elevator did not even consider cancelling his class, asks Irina Dumitrescu

UK minister Kemi Badenoch’s disavowal of the theory plays into a misleading right-wing narrative, says Hannah Robbins

The establishment of online learning and the routine use of email were long overdue, argues Ali Adnan Mohammed

Online courses should be easily adaptable to post-Covid circumstances – whatever they may be, says An Jacobs

Neoliberal administrators’ policing of institutional reputations and academic colleagues’ condemnation of dissenting voices on issues such as race and gender have led to claims that scholars are losing their ability to engage in free enquiry and open debate. But is academic freedom really the operative concept in the controversies that arise? John Ross probes a highly contested debate

Civilised adults should not have to demonstrate that they can stand up to bullying before being offered a job, says an anonymous academic 

No matter how hard they work, thousands will be dumped out of the labour market during the pandemic, say Harry Pettit and Alexandra Dales

Those temporarily plucked from the academic ranks would have no motivation or ability to wreak havoc and then move on, argues Bruce Krajewski

Patience will be required to bring along those who refuse to embrace racial equality or recognise it as a priority, says Jason Arday

Lecturers are being denied the flexibility they are compelled to offer students, despite being more vulnerable to the virus, says an anonymous academic

Publications must always permit debate on the quality and relevance of research – plus the efficacy and costs of derived policy, says Robert Dingwall

LSHTM director thinks communications failures explain why US and UK trail Vietnam and Senegal on pandemic responses