A spectre is haunting arts and humanities scholarship: the consequences of open access. Policy decisions are being taken now, but within the next three to four years, these missteps are likely to have profoundly harmed entire disciplines and possibly wiped out some of our most cherished learned societies. Given the huge pressures faced by academics […] … learn more→

People may think of comics and science as worlds apart, but they have been cross-pollinating each other in more than ways than one. Many classic comic book characters are inspired by biology such as Spider-Man, Ant-Man and Poison Ivy. And they can act as educational tools to gain some fun facts about the natural world. […] … learn more→

Readers expect academic writers to know what they are talking about. We meet that expectation by grounding our writing in good scholarship – and making it sound authoritative. Authoritative. You can see the words author and authority contained within authoritative – and this is no accident as the threesome have the same origins. An authority is a […] … learn more→

With the world’s annual climate conference, COP26, in Glasgow this year, you would expect the UK’s top research-intensive universities to be leading the response to the climate emergency. After all, they can readily draw upon expert advice. They should be showing the way to becoming zero carbon institutions. But ambitious targets drawn up a decade […] … learn more→

The democratization of access to universities is an issue that concerns, to a greater or lesser extent, all countries and higher education systems. The number of students who began to attend universities from the 1960s grew exponentially. This changed the way of understanding this institution. Its reason for being was no longer found only in an elite […] … learn more→

COVID-19 lockdowns were a huge disruption for Australian universities. With students unable to come to campus, many universities turned to “online proctoring solutions” to monitor students during exam time. Many of these systems rely on automated facial recognition or detection, often combined with human video-monitoring of students’ homes, leading to concerns about bias, inaccuracy and […] … learn more→

Erasmus is one of the more popular programs offering the students’ exchange in European countries. The major target group of the program is individual students, but also the entire academic organizations may participate in the exchange. The paramount objective of this project is to promote equal opportunities and fair access to education for students from […] … learn more→

The future for young academics looks bleak. A long-term trend – once linear, now exponential – shows that the percentage of PhD holders attaining a permanent faculty position is catastrophically low. While it is common knowledge that the academic market is turbulent, the pandemic has brought unprecedented challenges to a whole generation of students. I […] … learn more→

“Spanish university students do not know how to write.” This is a mantra that all teachers have heard at some time. This problem, far from being trivial, can have important personal and social repercussions. Not knowing how to write can limit the labor insertion of students and the international projection of Spain in spaces in which academic and […] … learn more→

With the proliferation of female robots like Sophia, chatbots like Amelia , and the popularity of female virtual assistants like Siri (Apple), Alexa (Amazon) and Cortana (Microsoft), artificial intelligence seems to have a gender issue. This gender imbalance in AI is a strong trend that has drawn strong criticism in the media. Even UNESCO warns of the dangers of this […] … learn more→