BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE

One way to gain a new perspective and inspiration for one's teaching practice is to go on a teaching sabbatical and teach or co-teach in a new context at another institution. Awarding or sending faculty on sabbaticals is an old practice and, at some institutions, a well-integrated part of faculty development (Kang & Miller, 1999).

WORK DONE

All authors have been fortunate to go on teaching sabbaticals funded by The Swedish Foundation for International Cooperation in Research and Higher Education (STINT,2025). Emma Riese was at Arizona State University 2024; Ric Glassey at the National University of Singapore 2023; Tomas Ekholm at Williams College 2019; Olle Bälter at Williams College 2008; Viggo Kann at Amherst College 2006; all in the fall semester.

LESSONS LEARNED

Going on a teaching sabbatical gave us all new perspectives and time to reflect. While moving to another country requires planning and determination, we all agree that it was definitely worth it! The experiences have broadened our perspectives, shaped us, and influenced our practices. Below are short descriptions of our journeys:

Viggo started to do research in Computer Science Education, and implemented several changes at KTH inspired by Amherst College. For example he changed the KTH cultureof not erasing the blackboard after each lecture, and he switched to holding one-hourinstead of two-hour lectures (Kann, 2010).

Olle changed his research area to Technology Enhanced Learning. Together with Viggo,they founded Cerise 1 , the CS Education research group. The sabbatical was a determining factor for the visiting scholarship at Stanford Graduate School of Education 2015-16. There he picked up the ideas on Question-Based Learning, later improved together with Ric to pure Question-Based Learning (Bälter et al., 2024).

Ric used the sabbatical to dive into learning science and the desirable and undesirable difficulties in learning. He was also able to reflect on other approaches to managing scale and quality against the rise of Gen-AI. This has led to a series of studies on how KTH might leverage AI to enhance our learning environment (e.g. Fayaz et al., 2025).

Emma’s biggest takeaway was how working as a teaching team created a supportive work environment for instructors and teaching assistants while ensuring students across all course sections got a similar student experience. She also had the opportunity to collaborate on training for teaching assistants (ASU, 2025).

Besides teaching a new course, Tomas took the opportunity to sit in on several courses with different teachers. It was a privilege to have time for this, while also having time to reflect.

TAKE-HOME MESSAGE

(1) Go on exchanges and teach! If you can, bring the rest of the family; it is a wonderful adventure. (2) There is much more to a teaching sabbatical than teaching! Reach out to the local pedagogical developers and engage to help further develop your own pedagogy. (3) It is an opportunity to say ‘yes’; to all the serendipitous meetings, seminars, and workshops that are a ‘no’ under the normal workload at home. (4) Absence makes the heart grow fonder! The grass may not be greener on the other side; however, having some distance from your typical environment can make you appreciate what you have and renew your efforts.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Thank you to The Swedish Foundation for International Cooperation in Research and Higher Education, STINT, for funding our teaching sabbaticals!

REFERENCES

Arizona State University, Ira Fulton Schools of Engineering, Learning and Teaching Hub,Teaching Assistants onboarding and beyond, URL: https://lth.engineering.asu.edu/referenceguide/teaching-assistants-onboarding-and-beyond/

Bälter, O., Glassey, R., Jemstedt, A., & Bosk, D. (2024). Pure Question-Based Learning.Education Sciences, 14(8). https://doi.org/10.3390/educsci14080882

Kann, V. (2010). Kan kvalitet på ett elitcollege föras över till svenska förhållanden? NU 2010.URL: https://suhf.se/static/2010/2010/konferensbidrag/Pass5_Kan_kvalitet_pa_ett_elitcollege_foras_over_till_svenska_forhallanden.pdf

Kang, B., & Miller, M. T. (1999). An Overview of the Sabbatical Leave in Higher Education: A Synopsis of the Literature Base.

The Swedish Foundation for International Cooperation in Research and Higher Education, STINT, Teaching sabbatical, URL: https://www.stint.se/en/program/teaching-sabbatical

Avid Fayaz, Richard Glassey and Alexander Baltatzis. 2025. Generating Personalized Assignments with Students in the Loop. In Proceedings of the 2025 on Innovation and Technology in Computer Science Education (ITiCSE 2025).

Stakeholders and researchers in higher education have long debatedthe consequences of English-mediuminstruction (EMI); a key assumption of EMI isthat student’s academic learning through English should be at least as good aslearning through their first language (usually the national language). This studyaddressed the following question: “What is the impact from English-medium instructionon students’ academic performance in an online learning environment?”“Academic performance” was measured in two ways: number of correctlyanswered test questions and through-put/drop-out rate. The study adopted anexperimental design involving a large group (n = 2,263) randomized control studyin a programming course. Student participants were randomly allocated to anEnglish-medium version of the course (the intervention group) or a Swedishmediumversion of the course (the control group). The findings were that studentsenrolled on the English-medium version of the course answered statisticallysignificantly fewer test questions correctly; the EMI students also dropped outfromthe course to a statistically significantly higher degree compared to studentsenrolled on the Swedish version of the course. The conclusion of this study is thusthat EMI may, under certain circumstances, have negative consequences for students’academic performance.

This study investigates how students reason about progression in an engineering programme. Here progression refers to the idea of setting up the educational programme so that learning activities build on previous ones and prepare for future ones, allowing students to gradually develop their competence and ultimately achieve the programme goals. It is not trivial to build progression into education programmes, and in particular, there may be differences between how the educators intended the curriculum to work and students' actual experiences. This study is based on 60 reflections on progression, written by engineering students. They were analysed thematically to identify the aspects viewed as important to create a good progression in the programme. The following categories were identified: teaching and assessment, repetition, making clear connections between prior and continuing courses, realistic progression, personal factors and alternative routes to progression. These findings give us better insight into the students' perspectives on requirements for appropriately creating progression in education programmes. After all, the students are the ones who experience the curriculum design and teaching in practice.

Fluency is a term commonly used to express proficiency within a specific area, often languages. However, it is sometimes also used in programming. In this poster, we present a phenomenographic study to investigate how CS students understand the term.

As engineering education is a professional education, it should prepare students for working life. However, there are obvious limitations to the amount of content that is possible to cover and the authenticity of the learning environments. In this study, we investigate the students' awareness and perception of these limitations by answering the following two research questions: What competencies do the students view as work-life relevant? How do students reflect on their opportunities to learn these competencies? The context of the study is the five-year Master of Science in Engineering and Computer Science at KTH Royal Institute of Technology. Throughout the programme, the students attend a programme-integrated course with four reflection seminars including written assignments each year. In their fourth year they wrote reflections on their perceived work-life readiness and 38 of these reflections were analysed thematically in this study. We find that students expressed an elaborate view of what constitutes work-life relevant competencies. They readily identify learning experiences in the programme where they have developed such competencies, for instance through projects. They also show an understanding that there are limitations in the ability of the university environment to achieve fully authentic learning experiences. Many students see it as their own responsibility and necessity to complement their education with other opportunities for work-life relevant learning, such as hobby projects or internships. Others seem relaxed about any gap they may have in their work-life preparation and expect to learn on their first job.

This work spotlights the experiences from ten years of implementing sustainable development in all educational programs at a technical university. With a focus on the critical issue of involving more academics in the work, experiences are shared through an ethnographic account including focus group interviews. "€˜Sustainable development"€™ has been perceived as both superficial and overwhelming; unclear yet somehow predetermined; it has been perceived to demand non-existent space in the curriculum; and it has challenged the academics regardless of the subjects'€™ relatedness to sustainability. It is concluded that the evolution of a web of interconnected people, key academics, activities, norms and tools has contributed to an increased participation. The work for authenticity, reliability and feasibility, along with institution-wide and long-term academic development tools is presented.

When trying to understand student success in computer science, much of the attention has been focused on CS1, leaving follow-up courses such as CS2 less researched. Prior studies of CS2 have often taken a deductive approach by focusing on predetermined variables such as CS1 grades, the impact of different paths from CS1 to CS2, gender and race. Although this has resulted in a better insight into these variables, we wonder if there might be another way of viewing which variables affect the students' success in the course. We have therefore chosen an inductive approach to better understand what these variables might be and how they interplay. This was done by analysing 16 semi-structured interviews with students enrolled in CS2 who have another speciality than computer science. The interviews focused mainly on the students' methods for succeeding in the course, experiences of the course and programming background. Through a thematic analysis of the interviews, we found the following five main success variables for CS2: programming competence, computer literacy, opportunity to receive help, ability to help oneself and teaching. These variables can in several cases be related to the ones previously addressed, however, they can also offer a different perspective on student success in the course.When trying to understand student success in computer science, much of the attention has been focused on CS1, leaving follow-up courses such as CS2 less researched. Prior studies of CS2 have often taken a deductive approach by focusing on predetermined variables such as CS1 grades, the impact of different paths from CS1 to CS2, gender and race. Although this has resulted in a better insight into these variables, we wonder if there might be another way of viewing which variables affect the students' success in the course. We have therefore chosen an inductive approach to better understand what these variables might be and how they interplay. This was done by analysing 16 semi-structured interviews with students enrolled in CS2 who have another speciality than computer science. The interviews focused mainly on the students' methods for succeeding in the course, experiences of the course and programming background. Through a thematic analysis of the interviews, we found the following five main success variables for CS2: programming competence, computer literacy, opportunity to receive help, ability to help oneself and teaching. These variables can in several cases be related to the ones previously addressed, however, they can also offer a different perspective on student success in the course.

Teaching assistants (TAs) are often used in computer science (CS) courses to conduct tutorials in smaller groups and to be able to provide students with one-to-one help sessions. TAs can also assist with the assessment, which can be time-consuming in large classes. Previous research does, however, indicate that TAs can be poorly prepared for their work tasks. In this experience report, we present a TA training course that addresses this issue and prepares new TAs for their responsibilities. This includes conducting tutorials, tutoring and providing students with useful feedback in lab settings, and conducting assessments. In addition, we also aimed at creating a safe space for our TAs to discuss challenges and fears that they foresee or have already experienced as TAs. To do this, we developed an introductory course consisting of five modules, that are based on previous research on TAs in CS and in the Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge (TPACK) framework. The modules are: HR questions, classroom teaching, helping and supervising in lab sessions, assessment, and reflection and discussion. The course is given in a blended learning format, where the first three modules are student-paced online modules, while the last two are synchronous meetings. To evaluate the training, we present course evaluation results from 53 TAs who enrolled in this 6-hours course during the 2020/2021 academic year. We conclude that this TA training course has been well appreciated by almost all the participants, discuss lessons learned and future plans.

Teaching assistants (TAs), students who assist the faculty, are widely used in computer science (CS) courses. Previous studies have, however, shown that TAs could be poorly prepared and need training. Particularly, an interview study has shown that one of the areas where the TAs experience uncertainty is when assessing students’ oral presentations of their lab assignments. Based on that result and by interviewing course coordinators, we have developed and offered training workshops about assessment in CS. We invited our TAs in the introductory CS courses to participate on a voluntary basis. By distributing pre-workshop surveys at the beginning of each semester, and post-workshop surveys at the end of the semesters, to both workshop attendees (50) and non-attendees (44), we studied how the TAs conducted the assessments and what impact the training workshop had on their self-reported practice.  Both surveys had 11 identical statements that the TAs were asked to rate on a 7-point Likert scale. We also conducted interviews with four workshop attendees and three non-attendees. The results showed a significant difference between the two groups in the post-workshop survey: workshop attendees disagreed more with the statement “I try to assess students' understanding rather than the program”, which is more in line with the instructions given. In addition, when comparing pre- and post-workshop answers, the workshop attendees stated that they were less inclined to ask for help, experienced that the lab instructions were not detailed enough, and were more inclined to ask questions that convinced them that the students had written the program themselves. In the control group, no significant differences between pre- and post-tests were found.

Att ta upp frågor om jämställdhet, mångfald och likabehandling i en ingenjörsutbildning är viktigt men känsligt. Vi har utvecklat seminariet Minoriteter och likabehandling för civilingenjörsprogrammet i datateknik på KTH och gett vid tre tillfällen inom den programsammanhållande kursen. Vi analyserar vilket motstånd seminariet stötte på år 2018 och beskriver hur vi arbetat för att seminariet skulle kunna ges smidigare år 2021. Data från studentenkäter visar att motståndet har minskat och att merparten av studenterna tycker att seminariet nu är givande.