Service at a high level, the dedicated provision of digital services and the professionally relevant enabling of competence acquisition in the field of university teaching are the central guiding orientation of ZHL. As a central scientific institution, it approaches these tasks with a certain framing: A place where scholars offer other scholars a space for reflection in the field of higher education teaching, including competence building and skill training. The research fields and qualification projects are (more or less loosely) intertwined with the teaching tasks, just like the "ZHL users". ZHL locates the participants, enables contacts in the teaching community as "peer-to-peer" contacts and binds people through the qualification intention with a clear time perspective.

ZHL is an academic institution. Our research questions encompass various challenges of higher education teaching and the expectations placed on it. At ZHL, we conduct research on educational psychology issues in higher education, education and science research. The research questions are developed and addressed as research questions from the ZHL application context of higher education teaching. They are published in relevant journals. With the location in the research group of the scientific director, the research is aligned along the professional standards of psychology (publication-based doctoral studies, open science standards).

Completed doctoral dissertations have had, for example, the following topics:

• Perspectives on university teaching in subject comparisons. Subject cultures shape attitudes and approaches to university teaching and further qualification for university teaching. A doctoral project compared the views of the "hard" and "soft" sciences on university teaching. (Päuler-Kuppinger, L. & Jucks, R. (2017). Perspectives on teaching: Conceptions of teaching and epistemological beliefs of university academics and students in different domains. Active Learning in Higher Education, 18(1), 63-76. https://doi.org/10.1177/1469787417693507)
• Views on research and teaching of early career academics in psychology. A positive attitude and high commitment to university teaching should not come at the expense of high scholarly standards and engagement in research. A completed doctoral project compared attitudes toward research with attitudes toward teaching, particularly in psychology. (Hillbrink, A. & Jucks, R. (2019). "‘Me, a teacher?!’ – Professional role identification and role activation of psychology PhD students". Studies in Graduate and Postdoctoral Education, 10(2), 109-125. https://doi.org/10.1108/SGPE-03-2019-0031)
• Social psychological effects of digital teaching-learning formats. Digitization is changing teaching and learning in the university context. This doctoral project investigated how the context of university teaching affects learners and their collaboration. (Riehemann, J., & Jucks, R. (2018). 'Address me personally and I forget the others' Effects of language styles in a MOOC. Journal of Computer Assisted Learning, 34(6), 713-719. https://doi.org/10.1111/jcal.12278)

Ongoing work concerns, on the one hand, the role of AI applications such as ChatGPT in university teaching and, on the other hand, the relation to mathematics as a subject in the context of teacher training.