This special issue of Kybernetes is a contribution to the current crisis of education world-wide. The huge amount of evidence coming from the so-called science of learning is pointing to recurrent failures in the process of teaching at all levels: from schools to higher education in colleges and universities (Barnes et al 2017; Pascherl et al 2008). It started by shifting the main question of pedagogy from asking how teachers should be delivering their lectures to inquiring how students learn. This simple change in perspective moved the emphasis from designing teaching to understanding learning and allowed the entrance of different disciplines to the debate of pedagogy. Pedagogical problems were usually addressed by psychology and education. Nowadays a great deal of research on education comes from neurosciences (Howard-Jones 2010). Learning and teaching are being scrutinized from a more evidenced based approach.