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).

Technology-enhanced learning (TEL) is a research field occupied with how teaching and human learning can be supported through the help of digital tools for increased efficiency, effectiveness, learnability, and pedagogical values by applying verified learning theories supported by analyses of the data generated by the students’ activities. Research in TEL is closely related to a social mandate that is becoming eminent in education nowadays: digitalizing education in an accessible, ethical and sustainable way. Most literature on TEL has focused on technological aspects, pedagogical approaches, ethical considerations or accessibility concerns in isolation, often within different research communities. Also, with generative AI's broad and unpredictable impact, these gaps could widen further. This commentary paper aims to bridge these gaps by offering an integrated perspective addressing all three aspects—technology, pedagogy, and accessibility—while examining intersections and implications from multiple viewpoints. From a historical perspective, various educational technologies have facilitated the scaling of different pedagogies and contributed to students' understanding by enhancing personalized learning, expanding visualization possibilities, and improving access to learning materials. While television and radio enabled remote learning, technological advancements in recent decades have significantly increased accessibility, such as radio and TV learning programs, to the emergence of e-learning platforms, adaptive learning systems, and artificial intelligence-driven educational tools. However, it is essential to acknowledge that, despite these advancements, technology-supported educational tools often remain more accessible to learners from developed countries or those with a high socio-economic background who can afford the costs and possess the necessary skills for effective use of these tools.

We suggest lines of inclusion in human-computer interaction (HCI) investigation as an approach towards remediating some of the problems that arise with the increasing specialization (fragmentation) of HCI as a domain of scientific inquiry. As a complement to the study of subgroups of users and their special needs, consider users in subgroups as lying on a spectrum, a continuum, from “normal” users of the general population. Doing so can provide at least two wins: (1) The implementation of recommendations may reduce or even eliminate deficits that separate a sizable portion of the special needs group from general inclusion e.g., in the classroom or the workplace. (2) Recommendations emerging from the study of a particular user group may have broad application to the general population of people who use computers. Moreover, the study of a “special needs” group may prove an especially effective way to elucidate these general recommendations. We explore these wins with respect to two special user groups: Older people and people diagnosed with attention deficit and hyperactivity disorder (ADHD).

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 is the first to investigate how an online course consisting solely of multiple-choice questions and detailed formative feedback comparesto an online course format that was previously shown to be highlyeffective. Specifically, a pure question-based learning (pQBL) version ofa course was compared to a question-based learning course (QBL)which consisted of the same questions and feedback as the pQBLcourse, but also included ordinary texts about the subject. To explorehow pQBL and QBL compared in terms of learning outcomes andcompletion time, 492 employees at the Swedish Employment Agencywere randomized to either a pQBL or a QBL version of a course aboutIT security. The results indicate that the pQBL course resulted in equallygood or better learning outcomes compared to the QBL course. Thisresult was robust to changes in how course quality was defined. Inaddition, participants completed the pQBL course slightly faster.Because a pQBL course requires less resources to produce, there arebenefits to relying on the pQBL method when teachers or studentshave limited time. Further benefits that come with the flexibility of thepQBL method are discussed

In today’s growing interconnected and rapidly evolving world, where all aspects of human life are interdependent, a broader understanding of cultures, economies, politics, and social issues is required. Considering the importance of education role in this issue, diverse traditional education systems around the world have resulted in fragmented approaches that fall short in preparing individuals for the complexities of an interlinked global society. To this end, it is necessary to provide a new innovative education model that adapts to and integrates evolving socio-economic and technological dimensions. This paper presents a great vision of a comprehensive framework for a dynamic global education system leveraging cutting-edge digital technologies such as artificial intelligence to interconnect economic, social, cultural, technological, and well-being dimensions aligning with the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), thereby facilitates equitable access to quality education and aspires to transcend conventional boundaries leading to foster holistic development and global collaboration.

We have evaluated a new pedagogical approach, pure question-based learning, or rather, a modern, digitized version of a really old approach: the Socratic method of learning. The pedagogical approach was evaluated and improved using a design-based research methodology. An online course was developed with pure question-based learning to explain its predecessor: question-based learning. The course was successively taken by students, researchers, and practitioners, and discussed in four group seminars. Feedback from each iteration was integrated into the next version and the course is still in use, see link below. Results from the design-based research process were positive ((Formula presented.) participants, over four iterations) with the main negative results coming from the unfamiliarity of the format and feelings of exam-like stress during the first encounter. While pure question-based learning is new, it builds upon well-tested pedagogical methods. The method has several potential advantages: learning can be broken down into smaller modules, there is less passive learning for the students, less learning material needs to be created and AI could be used for this creation.