Finally we have reached the end of the spring semester, after a very intense period. The last couple of weeks my time has been filled with both examination, research conferences and the graduation ceremony for our master of science students in the City Hall. During the graduation ceremony the presentation of the diplomandi was mixed with musical entertainment by the KTH academic orchestra conducted by director musices Gunnar Julin and the student choir. It was a very impressive and beautiful arrangement, I really appreciated the opportunity to present and congratulate all of ITMs graduates 🙂

Coming closer to 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. But this week has also offered other exciting and interesting education-focused events. For instance I got to see the impressive work done by the students in the Energy Management course (MJ2410), since they presented their project results in Sing-sing (where my office is located). The students have studied each Tokyo district, during the course, to propose solutions for a more energy efficient Tokyo in the year of 2040. The initiative is based on a collaboration between KTH and the Gadelius company (which operates in the interface between Sweden and Japan). The students proposed creative and innovative solutions based on a holistic approach in order to reduce the energy use in buildings, increasing the amount of renewable energy and reducing carbon dioxide emissions. On June 4^th, five groups presented their solutions to Japanese ambassadors, KTH representatives, external companies and the Gadelius company. The two winning groups won a trip to Tokyo in September to present their solution proposals for various representatives from companies and representatives for Tokyo City.

/ Anna Jerbrant, GA

Here’s a picture from the event:

The main focus for the strategic education development work at ITM-school right now is to identify, formulate and discuss the educational parts of the development plan. This work will be executed during May through two workshops (on May 8^th and May 29^th ), and if anyone is interested in participating in these please send an e-mail to me anna.jerbrant@indek.kth.se.

Besides that, we also have a number of more operational issues to work with, for instance regarding the master and batchelor thesis projects (that are coming to an end in May/June) as well as discussions about the results of this year’s admission of new students to our programs.

Beyond this, I hope you’ve seen the interesting article in Campi regarding the so called PriU-groups? The initiation of these groups is based on a need to strengthen the collegial influence within the decision making focused on KTHs education. The purpose of the PriU-groups (that where initiated at the beginning of last year) are to gather faculty with educational responsibility in order to find new perspectives and solutions for a lot of different kind of problems. The organizers of the PriU-groups have (since April) made sure that the groups are open to all staff – teachers and administrators – who feel committed and want to be involved and change our education. The aim is to strengthen the quality of education, by taking advantage of more of the expertise within the entire KTH organization, and therefore groups focus on everything from digitization and internationalization to working life and practical issues such as premises, schedules and planning. Read more about it in Campi.

In Campi you can also read about the new manual that KTH has provided that is focused on how teachers can achieve the best effect when making filmed lectures online. The interest in e-learning has increased significantly during the last couple of years, largely due to KTH’s initiative on MOOCs, massive open online courses, which has enabled that a large number of lecture videos has been produced. Jonas Thorén, at KTH’s media department, who produced many of the films, has therefore produced a handbook with the purpose to help teachers with presentation design and video production. Very interesting! If you want to read more about it go to Campi.

/ Anna Jerbrant, GA

Now the spring semester of 2018 has begun and hopefully all our courses and education is up and running. Personally I look forward to supervise master thesis projects, meeting all off these creative and engaged students close to their graduation is inspiring 🙂

One important educational issue that is upcoming is that it’s time for us to start working with this years program analysis. The program analysis are governed by the fact that KTH’s programs has to be designed in such a way that they comply with both the university’s learning objectives as well as the Learning Outcome of the Higher Education Ordinance. Also UKÄs mission for the new national quality assurance system for education is based on the fact that the higher education institutions are given increased responsibility for their own quality assurance at all levels of education, and then UKÄ will review that the institutions have taken this responsibility. In order for us at ITM to be able to do reliable and accurate program analysis all course responsible teachers must contribute with course evaluations and course analysis. So, if you have a course that is mandatory for any of our programs, please send the course analysis to the program director!

Lastly I hope that you all have seen the invitation send by the ITM management team regarding Södertälje Science Week (January 31th – February 2^nd). The new campus in Södertälje is very important for many of our programs, so if you want to know more about this event you can find more information here.

/ Anna Jerbrant, GA