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Academic cultures might be perceived as conservative, at least in terms of development of teaching and learning. Through a lens of network theory this conceptual article analyses the pattern of pathways in which culture is constructed through negotiation of meaning. The perspective contributes to an understanding of culture construction and maintenance with a potential to aid academic developers and others in the endeavour to influence teaching and learning cultures in academia. Throughout the discussion the importance of supporting the weak links between clusters of individuals stands out as a feature to focus upon. We propose that the sheer complexity of culture construction and maintenance in academic organisations is likely to cause any single, isolated attempt for change to fail Instead, we argue that a multitude of inter-related initiatives over a long period of time is likely to distinguish strategies that are successful in influencing academic teaching and learning cultures.

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This article contributes to knowledge about learning in workgroups, so called microcultures in higher education. It argues that socially constructed and institutionalised traditions, recurrent practices, and tacit assumptions in the various microcultures influence academic teachers towards certain behaviour. In line with this perspective, we present a heuristic with the potential to differentiate various types of microcultures: the commons, the market, the club, and the square. The heuristic is based on a socio-cultural perspective and research on collective action. Its purpose is to assist academic developers to fine-tune their approaches while engaging with colleagues, but also to aid further inquiry into how institutionalised norms and traditions influence academic teaching and student learning.

This paper explores, mainly through a socio-cultural perspective, the role of mid-level leadership in higher education in relation to educational development. It is argued that supporting and engaging local-level leaders, such as academic programme directors, increases the potential for development of local teaching and learning cultures. The paper describes a programme in a research-intensive university, where leaders conduct scholarly projects focused on contextualised educational development and leadership. Projects are reported in writing and peer-reviewed within the programme. In this article 25 project reports are analysed through a framework focusing on the relational and contextual aspects of leadership. Four projects are specifically elaborated to illustrate important aspects of leadership that become visible through the analysis. These aspects relate to external and internal mandates to lead, i.e. the potential actions available to leaders when navigating the need to build and maintain legitimacy in the formal organisation as well as in the group/s that they as leaders try to influence.

The COVID-19 pandemic caused a global disruption to higher education, especially in engineering education, where many teaching and learning activities are difficult or impossible to conduct online. This study examines the changes in the students' experiences of this disruption using a 26-item process-oriented course experience questionnaire (CEQ) that was already in use in the Faculty of Engineering at Lund University (LTH), rather than a newly created pandemic questionnaire. This allowed results from spring 2020 to be compared with corresponding data for 2017-2019. Overall, the students expressed lower satisfaction with their courses, indicated they received less feedback and fewer valuable comments, and found it harder to understand the expectations and standards of work. On the positive side, students reported that assessment was less about facts and more about in-depth understanding. By gender, male students were overall more negative to the experience of online learning, whereas female students appeared better able to benefit from the shift to online learning. Our results show the great advantage of using a robust course evaluation system that focuses on students' learning experience rather than satisfaction, and suggest a way of being prepared to systematically study the effects of possible future disruptions to higher education.

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