Many courses at Karlstad University involve multiple teachers collaborating within a single course. Depending on the course, this approach not only alleviates the heavy teaching load but also enhances the overall learning outcomes for students. However, multi-teacher courses present certain challenges regarding communication and the need for a unified approach to student engagement. A significant concern is the risk for ineffective communication among teachers, especially within the course portal (Canvas), which is not commonly used for this purpose. External repositories – there is a multitude of such – may constitute a barrier for new or infrequent teachers on a course. On the other hand, based on our experience, Canvas does not facilitate teacher-to-teacher communication very well by default. To address these challenges, we share tips and strategies that we have found effective in our teaching while using Canvas or that we discussed with other teachers in a 2023 KauKan workshop dedicated to this topic, as well as our suggestions for future developments to improve the platform’s functionality.

Fifteen new chapters showing the path to tomorrow! This is a result of the collaboration between the disciplines of Information Systems and Law at the Business School of Karlstad University. Besides involving portions of our master students, it also integrates exchange students and other international students. The collaboration is motivated by the on-going integration of law and technology and the international ramification of that integration.

After a ten-week course that vetted new trends in Legal Tech, the students were to present an individual report highlighting the use of generative AI in Law. However, they were also requested to write a portion of the thesis aided by generative AI. They were free to decide upon the exact approach and the topic to illuminate, but also how to elaborate their own ways of making explicit when and to what extent they used AI contributions. 

For the syllabus of the course modules, see page 416. The course language is English and the modules will continue to be open to international exchange students, as well as for eligible practitioners and students, who may apply for the courses independently of the programs at Karlstad University. The theses resulting in the chapters of this volume are written either within JPA005 or ISAD21 as indicated below the name of each author in each chapter.

This paper examines how the emerging concept of non-technical debt (NTD), specifically Process, Social, and People Debt, can be utilised to understand and address recurring issues in game development. Drawing from Politowski et al.’s large-scale analysis of 200 game postmortems, we map the top ten industry challenges to NTD as described by Ahmed and Gustavsson. Politowski’s analysis showed that many issues, such as unclear vision, misaligned teams, and stress, stem from human and organisational decisions rather than technical limitations. While technical debt is well known, the growing recognition of NTD remains underexplored in game development. We argue that applying an NTD lens during development, rather than after the fact in a post-mortem, can help teams avoid costly issues, particularly in creative and high-pressure environments such as game production.

There exists a significant knowledge gap in the scientific literature concerning the effective design of remote focus groups, particularly with regard to facilitating interactive engagement among participants. This paper aims to address this gap by presenting a hands-on guide for designing online or remote focus groups, emphasizing approaches to enhance interaction. Our guide is informed by prior works and our recent empirical experiences in conducting remote focus groups. We offer this guide as a resource for researchers, students, and practitioners seeking to conduct remote focus groups and facilitate interactions.

Imaging and assessing mobile technology for development (M4D) means understanding the use of appropriate technologies and services, and how they directly or indirectly address socio-economic challenges. This book adopts various perspectives to identify the obstacles to affordable digital technologies in order to enable, enhance, and effect development. 

The book plays on the tension between success reports and optimistic projections, on one hand, and empirical evidence of technological belly splash, on the other hand. The areas covered include infusion of service education in computing education, the Rwandan establishment of African Centres of Excellence to promote the development of appropriate technology, the metaverse’s realisation in a mobile network-enabled “metaversity”, and difficulties detected when evaluating digitisation of distance learning, students’ security awareness, dissemination of agricultural information, and mobile payment. The decolonisation of community-based media and attempts to step outside the mobile network and Internet are also covered.

First-year engineering students show difficulties in connecting basic vector algebra with manipulations using the graphical representation. Experiencing vectors in real applications can improve the process of learning vectors. Thus, we introduce a unique approach for using digital technologies, namely augmented reality. We utilized a video see-through head-mounted display to develop a vector manipulation tool enabling users to select and place virtual vectors in the real environment. The aim was to see how students react when experiencing vectors in augmented reality. After using the prototype, students answered a questionnaire about this experience. Results show that students experiences are positive and they are motivated to use the prototype in the course. Further, we investigated opinions about vector concepts from students in the trial group and other students attending the same course in vector algebra. The results indicate some differences in what students spontaneously associate with the concept vectors. Moreover, this study provides insights into how such investigations can be elaborated in the future.