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The purpose of this paper is to identify the core dimensions of user experiences in a physical and technologically embedded learning environment (LE) designed to support active student-led inquiry-based studies and collaborative knowledge creation in higher education.

The paper integrated the USEframe of usability of built environments and the inquiry-based engaging learning environment (ELE) to test and develop the usability and pedagogy of future LEs. A group of ten teacher students was studied and interviewed semi-structurally after a seven-week inquiry-based course unit. The findings were considered in light of the two frameworks.

The physical and embedded LEs provided the students with socio-digital affordances that promoted experienced study engagement, knowledge co-creation and sharing and a sense of safety and belonging in the scientific community. The application of the ELE model and the agile physical setting complemented and supported each other and promoted learning.

The results shed light on how to integrate understanding the user process, user experience and use of embedded LEs to develop usability of new LEs.

The living lab provides different stakeholders with tangible information about usability and helps the designers in concrete streamlining of pedagogy and physical LEs.

The purpose of this study was to explore school principals’ job crafting profiles during the prolonged COVID-19 crisis in 2021, and investigate profile differences regarding principals’ own perceived servant leadership, stress and work meaningfulness.

Using latent profile analysis (LPA), two job crafting profiles were identified: (1) active crafters (55%) and (2) average crafters (45%). By auxiliary measurement-error-weighted-method (BCH), we examined whether and how job crafting profiles differed in terms of servant leadership, stress and work meaningfulness.

Active crafters reported higher than the overall mean level of approach-oriented job crafting (increasing job resources and demands), whereas average crafters reported an overall mean level of approach-oriented job crafting. Avoidance-oriented job crafting by decreasing hindering job demands did not differentiate the two profiles. Active crafters reported significantly higher servant leadership behavior, stress and work meaningfulness than average crafters.

Study findings provide new knowledge and reflect the implications that the unprecedented pandemic had for education. This study contributes to the existing literature within the scholarship of job crafting through empirical research during the prolonged COVID-19 pandemic. For practitioners, these study findings reflect contextual constraints, organizational processes and culture, and leadership in workplaces.

The aim of this paper is to explore doctoral students' engaging and disengaging experiences among a group of students whose doctoral processes had been prolonged for more than seven years.

The participants were 16 doctoral students in the behavioural sciences. The data were collected with interviews employing a visualisation of their doctoral journeys, and were content analysed qualitatively.

The results suggested that the students described their engagement in doctoral work in terms of dedication, vigour and occasionally absorption. In turn, disengagement was described in terms of insufficiency, cynicism and sometimes exhaustion. Interestingly, the source of engagement was typically a sense of belonging in the scholarly community, whereas the students often reported a lack of autonomy and a lack of belonging as sources for disengagement.

Further longitudinal studies are needed to explore the development of engagement in doctoral work among students from different contexts.

In terms of developing more engaging learning environments, the findings imply that by enhancing students' sense of belonging to their scholarly community and their experiences of autonomy within it their engagement in doctoral work, and further, development as researchers can be fostered.

This study extends the understanding of what may engage or disengage students from their doctoral studies and the essential relationship between the sense of autonomy and that of belonging in doctoral student engagement, in particular in the context of prolonged doctoral studies in the behavioural sciences.

This article is intended to contribute towards furthering the understanding of researcher development as demonstrated by doctoral students' learning within scholarly communities. The article does this by reporting the findings of a study that explored the students' key learning experiences during their doctoral journey.

The 19 participants were natural science doctoral students from a top‐level research community in Finland. The data were collected through interviews that were qualitatively content analysed.

The participants emphasised the significance of participation, development as a scholar, developing specific research competences as well as learning to balance between doctoral research and other institutional tasks. They situated the key learning experiences in collaborative academic contexts such as research activities, taking courses, and academic meetings. The participants generally perceived their experiences as positive and enhancing.

Significant learning experiences identified by natural science doctoral students themselves are rarely studied. The results of the study reported in this article may be used by doctoral trainers, supervisors and students to create environments that foster students' learning and researcher development through their participation in scholarly communities.