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

Now the first period of this academic year has passed and I hope you all consider the courses and examinations within your responsibility as successful.

When it comes to educational issues – both at an ITM School level as well as a KTH level – several important things are going on:

A new decision (v-2019-0109) clearly states that examinators and course responsible teachers are not allowed to cancel or change dates and times for the written examinations that are in the fixed schedule. So, it’s very important that we all are active in the assessment period of the schedule.

Read more about important dates for the scheduling process here

Also, the work has now begun to ensure that the software needed for the spring semester of 2020 is available in the computer rooms. During summer and winter breaks, maintenance work is carried out in the computer rooms (for instance upgrades or replacing of computers). This has affected the range of installed software in the computer rooms, so we cannot expect that a software available previous semester is still installed.

Read more about ordering of software on this IT support page

On November 9^th KTH Giants 2019 is having an event on Campus Valhallavägen with several interesting and motivating speakers and several possibilities to learn more about our educations.

Read more about Giants here

KTH has decided to offer a Degree Program in Engineering Mathematics (CTMAT) starting in autumn 2020, and the ITM program “Civilingenjör & lärare” has a new program director since October 15^th: Annica Hofberg.

Finally, I hope you all have read the recent post in Sigbritt Karlssons blog where she shares ideas on new ways of learning and studying in Europe.

Read President Sigbritt Karlsson’s blog here

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

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

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

I guess that most of us have an intense focus on two major educational issues right now; concluding period three and designing all the exams that have been ongoing this week and also updating course plans for the next academic year. These updates are significant since from HT19 all courses that are included in special eligibility need to be included.

Changing and updating ITM’s course plans according to KTH’s new regulations regarding intended learning outcomes and grading criteria is considerable work and I’m very grateful for the effort that all colleagues have put into this. But since all of us have not finished the changes yet I also want to send a reminder to those of you that have not been able to submit anything yet. If you want to read more about this, and get some useful ideas, please check out this website here.

I would also like to promote (again) that KTH is arranging the third SoTL Conference at Campus Valhallavägen in Stockholm, 28-29 of March. Read more about the Conference SoTL here.

/ Anna Jerbrant, Director of First and Second Cycle Education