The notion «enthusiasm» is commonly used to describe excellent teaching, among students as well as university teachers. The word may contain many connotations, but when applied as a criterion for teaching, enthusiasm is commonly categorized as a personality trait. Researchers have often studied operationalized instructional behaviors associated with enthusiastic teaching, whereas research on teachers’ own subjective views on enthusiasm are rarer. This article presents some findings from an online questionnaire administered at the University of Oslo in 2015, which was answered by 1 229 staff members holding different teaching positions. Degrees of enthusiasm in teaching are matched with data about different teaching obligations. Many university teachers regard enthusiasm as a personal trait, but interest in subject matter is considered even more important for their enthusiasm. Teachers’ descriptions of enthusiasm may include emotional aspects as well. In addition, their descriptions imply that enthusiasm can also have a relational dimension, in that it is intended to affect student engagement in learning. Finally, there are indications that enthusiasm may be of a developmental nature. In line with this, some implications for academic development courses are mentioned, that may stimulate cultivation of genuine and authentic forms of enthusiasm in teaching.

In 1973, Naftulin, Ware and Donnelly published a paper titled «The Doctor Fox Lecture: A Paradigm of Educational Seduction». The researchers reported from several studies where an expressive and enthusiastic «expert» delivered a lecture on the topic of mathematical game theory and physician education. The lecture was without any meaningful content, but the audience liked it and the paper concluded that they had been seduced into an illusion of having learned something significant. The study has since been heavily cited and much debated. Much discussion has been related to the validity of students’ evaluation of teaching and whether such evaluations indicate learning. Forty years after the first Dr. Fox study, Peer and Babad (2014) decided to replicate the original study. Results were surprisingly consistent regarding students’ satisfaction with the lecturer, but the new study did not confirm that students were seduced into the illusion of having learned. In the present paper, I will review central studies on the «Dr. Fox effect» and discuss the possible impact of teachers’ enthusiasm on students’ learning.

University teachers’ engagement in teaching is a crucial aspect for the quality of student learning. In this article, we explore where such engagement comes from. We use a sociocultural perspective to investigate how teachers’ colleagues and leaders, in what we call academic microcultures, influence such engagement. A microculture can be a working group such as a teaching team, an educational programme, a department or the like. It consists of a collegial context functioning over time long enough to allow for traditions, recurrent practices and common, often tacit assumptions to evolve. In such environments, certain ways of teaching and assessing students, ways of talking about teaching and students gradually develop. This article draws upon two previous studies of five strong and four developing microcultures in a research-intensive Scandinavian university. The results show how engagement for teaching and student learning is highly collegial and very contextualised.

Study programs in universities and colleges often consist of a number of smaller modules, which are combined with the intent to develop a coherent program. Whether study programs are always characterized by such coherence can be questioned, and study program leadership is currently seen as a measure that can address these issues. The article identifies factors contributing to fragmentation of study programs, and the challenges these create for those with a responsibility for coordination. It is argued that the development of coherent study programs is not only a question of leadership, but also of stimulating a collective engagement and responsibility among the teachers of the study program.

More than 40 years ago, Gunnar Handal made the distinction between the mediate and immediate teacher. When you teach distance education classes, the art of creating a spirit of engaged teaching and learning depend on your ability to engage as an immediate teacher, and how these qualities can be transformed to the mediated format of teaching online. In what the classics of distance education called «the guided didactic dialogue», the student was supervised in his or her process in relative solitude and without the supporting structures that are offered to students participating in the normal activities on campus. In the article we try to illuminate the issues that arise when we transform immediate to mediated teaching and learning, e.g. when we use media to teach. We pay attention to matters of teaching and supervision in particular.

The point of departure for this paper is the notion that students must engage in order to learn. However, views differ on what student engagement means. We therefore raise two questions: What does student engagement mean? How is student engagement researched? This paper sheds light on these questions through a description of perspectives in international studies of student engagement. The paper further discusses Norwegian publications in the light of international perspectives on student engagement. We will also discuss how to support student engagement in higher education. In conclusion, we suggest how research in this area may be developed.

The term «engagement» has flooded through British universities the way that the term «student centred learning» once did, but faster and more irresistibly, drowning everything in its path. And just like «student centred learning» the meaning of «engagement» has become less clear the more it has been used. One of my last public presentations was about seven quite different uses of the term «engagement», in an attempt to try to make sense of all the very different university initiatives I had come across, and their very different rationales, that were all flourishing under the banner of «engagement». It is all very confusing.

Nearly all the work undertaken, round the world on «engagement» has been about student engagement, for reasons I discuss below. I would like to comment here on two rather different meanings of «engagement» as the term applies to teachers.