As KTH employees, we often talk about how packed our schedule is; Research, teaching, strive for research funding, and of course, all the administrative efforts that altogether make it impossible for us to get bored at our workplace. Spice it up with the fear of the covid-19 virus – then we have no time to think about anything else.
Guest blogger Hatef Madani, impact leader at ITM.
However, at the moment we are also busy with another important exercise at KTH; you have probably already heard about the Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) 2020, that needs to be accomplished soon. Within RAE, we were asked to collect impact cases and write about the processes to enhance our impact. During the last few weeks, I had the privilege of meeting many of you at ITM to discuss impact and how to think and write about it. I must admit that I am very glad that after a few years of “soft discussions”, RAE 2020 brought us together around a tangible mission on the topic. I hope this is just the beginning of our journey.
Despite all those meetings at your department, you might still wonder what impact really is (then guess how hard it is to describe it in a few lines in a blog post…) If I give a try, I would say that it’s all about “WHY” we do our work:
how can the society benefit from our research?
how do we contribute to the creation of a better place to live?
how our research is linked to industries, policy makers, and the society as a whole.
In academia, we are usually expert on describing what we do and how we do it. We are often exposed to the questions about the fancy method/model that we have developed and/or the uncertainties in our experimental studies. However, it feels a bit out of our comfort zone when somebody asks us to explain the significance of our research to the society. This leaves plenty of room for improvement.
Yes, we all realize how packed our schedule is with our daily activities. But it is important to pause sometimes, take one step back and see the big picture by thinking about WHY we do our research. So please fill up your packed schedule with more IMPACT. It will not take much time when it gradually becomes our mindset.
/Hatef Madani, associate professor EGI, and impact leader at ITM
The Department of Learning in Engineering Sciences is working to provide the knowledge and insight needed to transform our education, something that can only be achieved in collaboration with all the Schools of KTH.
Guest blogger Arnold Pears.
The Department of Learning in Engineering Sciences faces a slightly different challenge to many other departments at KTH. While we share the common mission of teaching, research and collaboration with society with the rest of KTH, we also pursue research, innovation and developmental agendas that are of direct relevance to the educational mission of KTH and also Sweden.
Our department is committed to the vision that all staff and students involved in teaching and learning at KTH shall have the most well developed, supportive, exciting, efficient and personally rewarding environment we can achieve with the knowledge and resources available.
We aim to develop and deliver world leading higher education and equip our students with the skills, knowledge and dispositions necessary to lead technological and societal development, and position Sweden at the forefront as a developed and educated nation.
Delivering both world leading research, and also putting that research to use in the context of KTH’s internal development in both digitalisation of education, and also new pedagogies and ways to educate students, is a considerable challenge. As a way to meet this challenge the departmental research and development activity is guided by three future scenarios (A to C) which we pursue in parallel. These scenarios evolve from a single question:
“Is it appropriate that graduates who will work in a society dominated by Industry 4.0 should be educated in Education 1.0?”
A. Education 1+ – work within existing frameworks exploring the use of new pedagogical approaches and digital tools to enhance the KTH teaching and learning environment.
Examples of this type of activity include developing digital solutions e.g. Canvas to LADOK grade transfer, producing digital resources (e.g. learning glass presentations) and digital resources for flipped classroom teaching, and enhancing classroom pedagogy through the courses, networks, and other collegial activities we offer in theory and practice of teaching in higher education.
B. Education 1.5 – work to establish new ways to offer courses and programmes, help to evolve our education to make it more agile and relevant, while maintaining quality. Examples of this type of activity include, evaluation of new ways to assess knowledge (e.g. the ongoing digital examination project), KTH’s MOOC development project, and several ERASMUS+ projects currently underway.
C. Education 2 – new models and means to collaborate with students and life-long learners to deliver high quality education in a digital resource rich environment where educational activity benefits from transformational forces such as AI, Machine Learning, Learning Analytics, Virtual Reality, Augmented Reality. This type of research based exploration into new paradigms of education paves the way for experimental work and development that has the potential ro revolutionise education in a manner similar to that we observe in industrial and societal sectors.
One thing is certain however, the Department of Learning in Engineering Sciences cannot achieve its purpose in isolation. Collaboration and activities together with our colleagues and KTH leadership is the only way to make lasting enhancement to education and learning at KTH a reality. We are working to provide the knowledge and insight needed to transform our education, but we can only achieve anything real in collaboration with all the Schools of KTH and our colleagues in the disciplines where the teaching and learning challenges are an everyday reality. Finding better ways to collaborate and to make our expertise accessible to all of KTH is a central question, and one with which I expect to work intensively over the coming years.
We hope that many of you will work together with us in achieving the education of the future at KTH.
/Arnold Pears, Head of the Department of Learning in Engineering Sciences
This is your new, well fairly new, JMLA blogging. What JMLA is? It’s the person responsible for Gender Equality – Diversity – Equal treatment issues at ITM. I took on this role after Sofia Ritzén since I feel very strongly for these issues, especially gender equality.
The JML work at KTH is led by Anna Wahl, who brings together all the schools’ JLMAs. She organizes and develops the work at a KTH level. At the ITM school, we have a newly established JML group, led by me, consisting of all the head of the departments, the administrative head, GA, and JMLA’s partner from HR, a role that Helena Lundqvist very pleasantly has taken on. We will meet regularly to plan activities and lead the work on these issues at ITM.
There will be JML-groups at each department, some are already established, to work with more specific department related issues. These groups will interact across the departments and have contact with JMLA. That was just a brief description how we intend to organize the work.
What else has been done? Everyone with a management position has during the fall taken a course on gender equality led by Näringslivets Ledarskapsakademi. Here we have learnt a lot about equal treatment, we have had interesting discussions and given time to reflect on these issues. Many of you have attended workshops at the departments that was a part of this course. How to proceed this work was discussed at ITM’s annual leadership conference January 16th to 17th at Såstaholm. “What can I, as a manager at ITM, do to improve gender equality at ITM?” It resulted in a long list of useful ideas, at school level as well as at the department level. However (and this is important), this is a joint effort – no one is responsible for improving every single task on the list, but we are all good at something and together we can make a change. Gender equality is a prioritized area at KTH and mainstreaming is our government’s main strategy to reach gender quality. So working with gender equality is actually not a choice, and last but not least: it is a quality issue.
Last, I would like to share some reflections from the ITM’s annual leadership conference where Christer Olsson gave a very inspiring lecture on leadership. He said that gender equality is not a numerology but a feeling. I think it’s important to keep that in mind. The number is indeed very important, but we must not hide behind activities to improve the numbers. We must also improve the working environment so that everyone feels included, especially women. It is important that we can convey the feeling of being excluded to those who have not experienced it. We need to collect and share stories to reflect on. I would also like to point out that equality work is not at all just a benefit for women. Many men are also affected by the non-inclusive structure that many times prevail at KTH.
And further on we will also focus on the M and the L.
New year, new semester and time for me as dean of education to write my first blog of the decade. As usual we have several important ongoing educational issues to communicate:
Now we have finished the first semester with the new course plans since the changes of ILOs and examination due to the implementation of goal-oriented grading criteria. I know these changes was challenging for both how we design the exams as well as how we grade them, but it is beneficial for the educational quality, so good work!
At ITM we need to improve the publishing of course analyzes so that they are available for students, teachers and other employees at KTH. According to KTH’s guidelines (Riktlinje om kursvärdering och kursanalys) we are obliged to publish course analyzes after the end of the course and the course syllabus before the course starts. All course analyzes need to be made available at the ”Kursens utveckling och historik” page, which is a sub-page to the course page in the Course and Program Catalog. The easiest way to find this function is through links on the page “Course development and history” or on the course page. You can find more information and instructions on how to publish course analyzes here: Användarmanual – Om kursen. For the time being the number of course analyzes being published from ITM is very low so we really need to improve.
Also, I hope that you all noticed that KTH’s Vice-Presidents are blogging? Leif Kari (Vice-rektor för Utbildning) latest post had the headline Research + Education = True and is worth reading.
Conclusively, the president recently decided, based on the ITM school’s proposal, to appoint me as Deputy Head of the school. I’m very honored by this appointment and I think it will enable me to increase my efforts for an even stronger alignment between our educational development and the school’s overall strategic plans. And I’m looking forward to working even closer with the head of the school, the director of third cycle education, the head of administration and the responsible for faculty development at the ITM school with the help of both of these roles. I hope that being dep head of the school as well as director of first and second cycle education will enable me to intensify my strive for a high educational quality, increased process efficiency, sustainable engineering and added integration of gender, diversity and equality perspectives in our program and courses.
And I am very grateful being part of the development of the first and second cycle education at ITM. It is thrilling, sometimes frustrating, but always fun and very meaningful.
/Anna Jerbrant, Director of First and Second Cycle Education at ITM
Dear colleagues, I hope that all of you had a relaxing and fun time with family and friends during the holidays!
All leaders at ITM will gather at the conference center Såstaholm during January 16 to 17 for our annual leadership conference. This year the first day will focus on gender aspects under the lead of our JMLA Professor Annika Borgenstam. This is a follow-up of the four-day education for our unit leaders that took place during 2019. However, we will now begin making specific plans on how to continue the work on gender and equal treatment issues in respective department. The second day of the conference is organized by our HR manager Anna Blendow. Here, specific examples of situations leaders can bump into will be presented, and we’ll work together on how to strengthen the leadership of the ITM leaders.
I also wish to mention that I met with some of the Health and Safety representatives at ITM on January 9. It was very interesting to discuss both what they have been working with as well as how we can improve the collaboration between them and the management at the departments and at ITM. Currently, ITM lacks representatives from the Departments of Materials Science and Engineering and the Department of Industrial Production. However, I know that the unions at KTH are working on finding representatives here. A person having this appointment will learn a lot from being involved in systematic environmental work, reorganizations, reconstructions, etc. In fact, such an appointment is very good for a person’s curriculum for example if the person has the intention to apply for leadership positions in the future. We need engaged personnel that contributes to collaborations at ITM.
This spring, the research evaluation RAE2020 will be in focus and involve most researchers at ITM. President Sigbritt Karlsson wishes that the departments focus on their future development plans and get a specific feedback on these plans from international and national experts, mostly from academia, but also from industry. Those of us that have participated in RAE2008 and RAE2012 know that it is a lot of work, but also very fun!
Now that we all are back to work we enter a new exciting time – we are entering a new decade. We do not exactly now what will happen but only that all of us will influence what happens here at ITM. The quality of ITM’s work dependent on the engagement from each and every one of us.
