Author
Dear colleagues,
We have entered the month of May, which is supposed to be an official spring month. However, the weather forecast is still prediction cold weather this coming weekend so it is hard to say. At the same time, most of you work from home under these new circumstances where you are responsible for sharing your office and private life. As I mentioned before, I am very happy about how well things work despite the new situation. It seems like all of us have been forced to take a crash course in digitalization for dummies. This does not mean that we master all tasks, but that we made huge leaps compared to the beginning of the year.
It is now clear that an idea that was initiated at ITM has convinced the whole KTH that all of us need some stimulation in our daily life while working at home. Thus, KTH will now launch the KTH ACTIVE TOGETHER event as explained in this short statement:
May 18 – June 15 KTH organizes the ”KTH ACTIVE TOGETHER”! It is a fun challenge where we cheer and support each other to work out. Everyone can join on equal terms, regardless of fitness level.
KTH Active Together
Finally, I wish to share a movie I made together with the ITM communication personnel. My purpose is to inspire all of you working from home to become more active and to join the KTH ACTIVE TOGETHER event. Note, the film is not any “monkey business” or “fake news”!
/Pär Jönsson, Head of the ITM School
Author
Times is passing very quickly and we are soon leaving the month of April. This is a month were we know the weather is changing from summer weather to winter weather. Typically, we wear shorts and T-shirts one day and the next day we rapidly need to change clothes and remove ice from the car window. Soon entering May we long for warmer weather, but mostly we long for an improvement in the corona-virus situation. Some of the people at ITM has caught the virus, but not too many to my knowledge. A few of them has already come back to work.
In order not to spread the virus most of the ITM personnel work from home. We have heard mixed signals saying that “it is great to work from home” to that “I am bored to work from home”. Have patience, those of you longing for a new exciting activity will be happy. The administration at ITM led by Anna Blendow has pitched a competition and challenged the other schools at KTH. They thought it was a great idea, so keep your eyes open for We+, you will soon have more information about this.
Finally, I have one suggestion to those of you longing to celebrate the end of winter and to sing for the coming of spring: sing while watching the bonfire on Walpurgis on television!
/ Pär Jönsson, Head of the ITM School
Author
ITM School’s Faculty Assembly
Dear colleagues,
This time I wish to bring up the subject of making your voice heard in a democratic society. This message is especially directed to all teachers that have the possibility to vote for members to the new ITM School’s Faculty Assembly (Skolkollegium), which the KTH President has decided to initiate. Each of our five schools should have their own Faculty Assembly that will interact with the Faculty Council of KTH to discuss issues relating to the quality of education, research and community interaction. An electoral roll has been created and e-mails have been sent to all teachers on the roll.
The task is that each person should vote for one woman and one man from each department. At the end of the day, we will have 14 people from our 7 departments that will make up this new Faculty Assembly. At ITM, we started this procedure earlier this year by asking the teachers to go to our Student Offices to vote. However, very few people voted and we could not finish the voting before the corona crises started. Since then the ITM administration has tried to find solutions on how to carry out the voting in a digital setup. Since no one at KTH could help us, we had to get external help. Thus, now we have made it possible to hold the election and you can find more details in this link: Vote for the new ITM School Faculty Assembly
I kindly ask each teacher to vote before the deadline on Sunday April 28.
Digital exams
We have been able to give all exams during the re-exam period. Currently, Anna Jerbrant and her colleagues working with education are evaluating how it went to learn from both good and bad examples. At the same time, the departments have already started to plan for the exam period at the end of this semester. ITM will organize a large number of exams. Here, the Department Heads will designate faculty as well as PhD students to supervise these exams (tentavakter). In addition, we will also need to help each other from different departments where it will be necessary. In these times, we need to collaborate even more in order to fulfill our duties!
Working time and leisure time
Finally, I wish to say that many of you have suffered from working at home for a number of weeks now. We have clear signals from you that it both has been boring to work from home as well as hard to differentiate between working time and leisure time. My advice is to fix a working schedule per day and let your closest manager know when you sign in and sign out to, create a more structured day. Also, do not forget to enjoy the wonderful spring on your leisure time!
/Pär Jönsson, Head of the ITM School
Author
Dear colleagues,
I hope that all of you have enjoyed a relaxing Easter holiday with the closest family and closest friends. People like me, interested in gardening, did not think that the weather was good enough to spend a whole lot of time in the garden. But we know that warmer days will come!
No matter what you did on your holiday or what you do on your free time, it is important that it is not KTH work. It is a challenge, when most of the ITM employees work from home, to clearly separate the working time from the free time. I know many people have complained about this difficulty. I have heard cases where employees have agreed with their closest manager that they check in for work during a certain time span and then checks out after the working day is over. In this way, it is easier to separate the working time from the free time, when working from home.
We are in the middle of a re-exam period and many of you are involved in this new experience. We have suddenly fast been moved into the digital world of giving exams and most of us did not have a clue on how to do this. Just before Easter KTH tested on how to give exams including how to supervise students during an exam. This has been a challenge so far and it is not perfect, but as I mentioned in the headline “practice make perfect”. We will learn from each others experiences so that each one of us becomes more skilled in performing this new task.
I especially want to mention the need for having people supervising exams (tentavakter). KTH will not allow external people to be involved, so we will need to handle it by ourselves. We need to help each other between divisions and departments. One of the schools at KTH asked teachers and PhD students to volunteer for taking on these assignments. The result? …160 persons said that they are willing to help. This is impressive, but I hope that we at ITM have the same spirit among the teachers and PhD students!
Finally, I want to share a personal experience with respect to the English phrase “practice make perfect”. Yesterday, I hosted a digital PhD examination where my and Michael Vynnycky’s student Arash Safavi Nick defended his thesis. The three of us were gathered in the green room at KTH B for the defense. Everything had been planned well by the Service Center including the setup of the camera before the defense and starting the webinar. A few minutes before 10 am everyone is online, except for the opponent. It is during this times you start to think why is this happening now?….. Then, unexpectedly a voice comes up and says that I am from the KTH IT service and I am just checking in to see if everything is going well. After a phone call from this person to the opponent, the opponent managed to get him online. Puh! We were finally back in business!
So how was the defence? Well it became one of the longest defences I experienced. The open part took slightly more than four hours and the candidate got 137 (!) questions and comments. At the end of the day, the committee was very satisfied with the thesis and the answers to the questions, so ITM received a new Doctor, namely Dr Arash Safavi Nick. After the long defence, the supervisors and the new Doctor had a late lunch to celebrate the accomplishment of Arash. We also celebrated that we had been able to take the first step in to the new world of carrying out digital PhD defences. We are not perfect at this stage, but with practice we will excel our skills!
Pär Jönsson, Head of the ITM School
Author
I hope you are all healthy and still feel connected to KTH in these strange times when we’re all forced to work so much remotely from home. Since KTH of course gives priority to ensure that our students can complete their education (at the same time as we all work to reduce the spread of the covid-19 virus) studies and exams will take place remotely for the rest of the semester. This means that we must plan for alternative teaching and examination forms (and also make sure to attest invoices the same day they arrive to help our sub-contractors). You have all struggled extensively to execute all P4 courses by the help of digital tools and I am deeply impressed of the amazing result that ITM’s teachers has accomplished.
Personally my working days are filled with different investigations into the plethora of educational challenges that has arisen, as well as discussions and decisions in the multitude of meetings that the Committee for First and Second Cycle Education executes. The issues we discuss and then decide upon are presented here.
A page I hope both students are employees visit regularly.
Now the first major test of digital examination will come up during the re-exam period 14-17th of April. It will be an exciting and interesting time and I have the same challenges as many of you since I’m conducting a re-exam of my P3 course. So if you, like me, are trying to figure out the best way to design your digital re-exam please check out these useful pages (in Swedish).
And don’t miss out on the useful Lunch-n-learn seminars that are given every day this week through Zoom! Both coming and previous seminars are available here.
Finally I want to take the opportunity to wish you all a Happy Easter with lots of rest and good food.
Anna Jerbrant, Deputy Head of School
