Sitting at Arlanda Gate 6 a Sunday morning at 8 is a rather typical example of our working life at the ITM-school. I am on my way for two days in Wien to evaluate the energy research at AIT, Austrian Institute of Technology. Waiting at the gate watching people come and go is a good opportunity to reflect on international collaboration in general. Based on the recent number of applications received we are likely to enrol a record number of both paying and non-paying master students this fall. It looks very good. On the other hand, it is more work for us. Then, a colleague at the ABE School Olga pops up with Victor from our Int. office. This even more proves my point that this is rather normal for a KTH employee…
This week the important GA-meeting is handled for us by vice-GA Catharina Erlich and I am back on Wednesday morning. We are all eagerly awaiting the so-called “Axelsson Report” proposing new guidelines for KTH´s educational structure. One particularly important issue I see right now is however NOT included. It seems to me that we now have the possibility to build a smart new ICT infrastructure to manage our education including course management, electronic anonymized exams, reporting credits, following up programs and so on. You all know by now that we are supposed to switch from Bilda to Canvas (very probably) and from Ladok 2 to Ladok 3 and so on. What other changes are there in the future? Is it possible to integrate the systems? Who takes the lead? We cannot let those systems evolve one more time on their own without the obvious integration!
Finally some happy notes! We have had two anniversaries recently. I-section and program (I) turned 25 y old and our newest section, Energy and environmental engineering (W), turned 5. Congratulations!!! Who is next? Our program chair for the Material Design program Anders Eliasson claimed that a 200 y anniversary (!) was coming up soon in 2019. And we have the Campus Valhallavägen 100 y coming up in 2017.
/Per Lundqvist, GA