For eight weeks now, we have all executed our work-tasks from home and mainly interacted with each other through Zoom. Even though this in many ways has worked out great, at least I look forward to meet all of my colleagues IRL ☺ But in the meantime I can focus on future oriented activities and share some of those with you.
For instance, last week I attended the yearly dialogue meeting focusing on educational quality. The dean and vice dean of faculty (Anders Forsgren and Sofia Ritzén) managed the meeting and as usual I got the possibility to describe and discuss the strengths and opportunities, as well as weaknesses and threats (quality wise), for all of the ITM school’s educations on 1st and 2nd cycle level. The goal is that these dialogues will lead to increased quality and long-term improvements for all our educations.
Another very interesting and future oriented activity was this week’s Storträff, which I hope a majority of you could participate in. Storträffen is something that occurs once every semester, were the vice-president for education invites teachers, educational leaders, other staff and student representatives to a meeting that raises current and prioritized issues for KTH’s education. Yesterday we both got to listen to the thoughts and reflections from the president as well as the vice-presidents. We also had three discussion sessions in breakout-rooms focused on different important subjects, for instance examination on a distance (both supervised and unsupervised), how to help students avoid plagiarism, connections to professional practice and engagement with external actors in education, sustainable development and education, a follow-up of the implementation of goal-oriented grading criteria’s and so on.
Major parts of the meeting were recorded and will probably be published here: www.kth.se/social/group/prioriterade-fragor-/
The next Storträff will be held on December 3rd 2020.
Finally, I would like to promote that KTH is arranging the fourth SoTL conference for its faculty on 10 March 2021. The KTH Scholarship of Learning conference is aimed at all teaching staff, all pedagogical leaders, all levels of management and educational administration staff at KTH. The main theme of the 2021 conference is Learning Spaces: the physical, virtual and social rooms or arenas for learning that you and/or others have created and acted in. The conference will take place at Campus KTH, at Valhallavägen in Stockholm and you can find more information here: https://intra.kth.se/utbildning/utveckling-och-hogskolepedagogik/kth-sotl/conference-kth
So, let us all plan for participating and submit papers where we describe all the knowledge that we have gained during this spring semester!
/ Anna Jerbrant, Deputy Head of School
