ITM Management blogs

Let me introduce IRIS

Jenni Hollbrink

, 2019-09-23

Dear colleagues,

During spring 2019 I was contacted by the ITM management group, asking if I was interested in taking on the role as acting deputy head of the ITM School during the fall 2019.
The role involved a new ingredient. Added to the duties, there was a need for an explicit management role for coordinating research. Finding this a very interesting opportunity I accepted.

Under the leadership of Jan Wikander, the ITM management paved the way for a new overarching Research Initiative on Sustainable industry and society, raising funding in the order of 20 MSEK/year up to and including 2022. This initiative has as a main goal to create strong research environments at the ITM school, focused on achieving the mission stated in the ITM development plan. A key aspect of that is to stimulate and create new cross-department collaborations. The main goals, and the four areas part of this initiative, were set out in the ITM development plan.

One of the first things I did was to give the initiative a name – we now call it IRIS – the ITM school overarching Research Initiative on Sustainable industry and society.

IRIS represents a unique and probably unprecedented opportunity to proactively establish the ITM school at the forefront in addressing research on sustainable industry and society.

At the same time it’s important to coordinate and interact with other initiatives, for example the new KTH Industrial transformation platform led by Monica Bellgran. How can we leverage and create synergies between these multiple efforts.

Communication and involvement regarding IRIS is extremely important, and shortly we will create a web page that describes the IRIS initiative and how you can engage.

In the short term, do not hesitate to contact me, or one of the area coordinators as follows:

– Area 1: Industrial transformation through digitalization, renewable energy and circular economy; Antonio Maffei, IIP/Elena Fersman, MMK

– Area 2: Integrated mechanics, components and materials design, including additive manufacturing; Greta Lindwall, MSE/Raquel Lizarraga, MSE

– Area 3: Sustainable energy systems, infrastructure and business; Andrew Martin, EGI/Frauke Urban, Indek,

– Area 4: Innovation and entrepreneurship ecosystems and infrastructure; Jennie Björk, MMK/Anders Broström, Indek

And I very much encourage you to read the ITM development plan. You find it here:
https://intra.kth.se/en/itm/om-itm-skolan/itm-utvecklingsplan-1.916587

Martin Törngren, acting deputy head of school

Sign up for a course in Teaching and Learning

Anna Jerbrant

, 2019-09-10

It’s a joy that the autumn term of 2019 has started, that our P1 courses is up and running and the welcome reception of newly admitted students have enriched our views on campus.

There are several new and important educational issues affecting the coming semester that is worth emphasizing. For instance, there are several courses in Teaching and Learning in Higher Education available for the academic year 2019-2020 (both in English and Swedish). One example is the Basic course LH231V (7,5 credits) but there are also continuation courses (see examples at the end of the post).

Since these continuation courses cover several important strategic aspects I highly recommend that as many of us as possible attend them. You can find an overview of all courses in Teaching and Learning in Higher Education through the link.

Focus on special needs

I also hope you all have gotten information on the President’s decision about a new procedure for support to students with special needs during examination? I have discussed this new guideline with all the Head of studies at all ITM departments and based on that we concluded a recommendation for all ITM examinators on how to manage the changes specified in the new regulations in the best way possible. I hope you all have gotten that information from your departments Head of Studies, otherwise let me know so that we can increase the communication. J

Examples of continuation courses

LH215V Learning for Sustainable Development, 4,5 credits
LH216V Att utveckla lärandet med betygskriterier, 1,5 hp
LH216V Develop the Learning by Using Grading Criteria, 1,5 credits
LH217V Att leda utbildningsutveckling, 3 credits
LH219V Supervision and Assessment of Degree Project Work in First and Second Cycle, 3 credits
LH225V Genus och jämställdhet I högre teknisk utbildning, 4,5 hp
LH233V Teaching and Learning for Challenge Driven Education in a Global Context, 3 credits
LH235V Global competence for teachers in higher education, 3 credits
LH238V Digital Learning in Higher Education, 4,5 credits (information will be published in February 2020)

/ Anna Jerbrant, Director of First and Second Cycle Education

New leadership at ITM and welcome back

Pär Jönsson

, 2019-08-29

Dear colleagues,
I wish to welcome you back from your vacations. I hope that all of you now have returned with an extra boost of energy so that you are ready to continue your work tasks in a successful manner!

As you all know by now, the President has initiated a process to select a new Head and Deputy Head of the ITM School. A committee consisting of participants from both KTH and ITM will be formed. The goal is to select the new leadership during the autumn so that they can start their positions in January 2020.

The President has appointed me as a Acting Head of School and Martin Törngren as the Deputy Head during the period of July 1 to December 31. Martin’s focus will be to lead an integrated research initiative that the ITM Management group has decided on earlier this year. I will let Martin explain more about this in his own blog.

My job will be to carry out the Head’s tasks in a similar way as was done by the previous one. This means, for example, that every second Tuesday I will meet the Head of Administration Christina Carlsson, the Director of First and Second Cycle Education (GA) Anna Jerbrant, the Director of Third Cycle Education (FA) Malin Selleby, and the Responsible for the research initiative Martin Törngren. The purpose with these meetings is mainly to prepare relevant questions that we will discuss in the ITM Management group, which also are held every second Tuesday. The Management group also consists of the Department Heads, the responsible for the faculty and a student representative.

I also wish to inform you about a couple of activities that will take place during the fall:

The salary negotiations between managers and employees will take place in September.
The quality system for the education at KTH will be evaluated. We will inform you more in detail later. Now we now that the dates for evaluations will be October 1 and November 25 to 28.
The preparations for the assessment of the research (RAE2020) will start. This event will take place late August 2020.

Finally, I wish to share some of my summer activities. The most amazing thing I did during the vacation was the visit to Jededia Smith’s Redwood State Park, where a Star Wars movie was filmed. It is a fantastic feeling to take a walk in such a forest full of very tall trees that are more than 2000 years old. I strongly recommend a visit to a Redwood park if you get a chance!

/Pär Jönsson, Acting Head of School

Thank you and best wishes for the future!

Ulrika Georgsson

, 2019-06-18

First of all I would like to thank all of you for all the good work during my years as the Head of ITM – it has been a very interesting period, challenging at times, but overall very rewarding. I was overwhelmed by the celebration on May 14, all the participants, all the presents, all the songs, all the speeches and poems, and last but not least, the toastmaster. And the movie, what a remarkable production: the overall orchestration, the comfortable storyteller, the rejoicing chorus of happy administrators, and all the nice words from colleagues. Thank you all!

On the research side, coordinator pairs have now been appointed to lead the four new School overarching research initiatives for which the School has allocated dedicated research funding. The overall effort will be supervised by our new Deputy Head of School Martin Törngren. The areas and the coordinator teams are:

Industrial transformation through digitalisation, renewable energy and circular economy.
Coordinated by Antonio Maffei, IIP and Elena Fersman, MMK.
Integrated mechanics, components and materials design including additive manufacturing.
Coordinated by Greta Lindwall, MSE and Raquel Lizarraga, MSE.
Sustainable energy systems: Technical and business perspectives.
Coordinated by Andrew Martin, EGI and Frauke Urban, Indek.
Innovation eco-systems, innovation management and entrepreneurship.
Coordinated by Jennie Björk, MMK and Anders Broström, Indek.

I am sure that Martin Törngren will come back soon with a blog post with more details and strategies for these efforts.

Finally, I am convinced that the new School head team, Pär and Martin, will continue in a spirit of engagement, collaboration, innovation, equality, inclusion, good working climate, and most importantly environmental sustainability. In case the new management team runs into unforeseen challenges, I will leave some literature on my office desk that might be of help in tricky situations. A few example titles are:

Crisis management, Public Leadership under Pressure
Our Iceberg is Melting: Changing and Succeeding Under Any Conditions
Organisatorisk resiliens – Vad är det som gör företag och organisationer livskraftiga?

Good luck Pär and Martin! And Pär, the gavel I handed over at the festivities, and which was once handed over to me by Bengt, might come in handy in critical situations.

I wish all the best for ITM in the future!

/Jan Wikander, retiring Head of the ITM School

Time to wrap up P4

Anna Jerbrant

, 2019-06-10

A very intense period is about to be completed, and besides finishing the two courses I have been responsible for during P4, I also attended the yearly dialogue meeting focused on educational quality. Among the attendants were the Vice Present for education Leif Kari and the Dean of Faculty Katja Grillner, and the meeting gave me the possibility to describe and discuss strengths and opportunities, as well as threats, for all of the ITM School’s educations on 1st, 2nd and 3rd cycle level. The goal is that these dialogues will lead to increased quality and long term improvements. Besides this, I also had the pleasure to attend KTH’s graduation ceremony on May 29. It was a very impressive and beautiful arrangement, I really appreciated the opportunity to present and congratulate all ITM’s graduates. 🙂

Two important educational issues to emphasize

If you as a teacher have students that contact you because they haven’t registered for an exam in time, there is no idea to send an e-mail to the administrators asking them to register the student manually afterwards. This is not possible and not allowed at KTH, so instead we should refer the students to the guidelines here. There they can find information on how they should go about to try to participate in the exam anyway. The guidelines say that:

Students who have not registered for the exam in time, may write the exam if there is a free seat in the examination hall. The student has to submit a valid course registration transcript. Note! Digital transcripts do not apply in this case.

Moreover, it is also important for us to remember that exams can only be corrected with an ink pen, and that points and grades should be clearly marked in the boxes on the cover pages. Otherwise it will not be possible to scan the corrected exams.

But now that all of us are approaching summer vacations it’s time to summarize all P4 courses, complete the work of writing and correcting all the examination and enjoy the knowledge gained by all our excellent students when conducting their master thesis projects.

/Anna Jerbrant, Director of First and Second Cycle Education at ITM

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