The analysis has embraced internal and external workshops, external analyses, literature reviews, field trips, and participation in national and international education conferences.
KTH needs to continue to strengthen and further develop its study programmes such that its students will be even better equipped to address and find solutions to societal challenges. As this requires both interdisciplinary knowledge and solid basic knowledge, it will correspondingly require even better utilisation of digitalisation and our campuses for learning.
Future education will need to meet different challenges such as greater international competition, rapid developments in technology and the risk of ever increasing political control of university activities. Better to initiate such development ourselves. A framework for future education is accordingly being developed and is currently based on 13 principles that point towards the direction in which we should travel:
On student learning and the educational environment:
Active learning
Examinations for learning
A developing educational culture
Skills development of the teaching role
On the learning environment – physical, digital, and psychosocial:
Accessible experimental environments
Living campuses
On skills and abilities developed:
Ability to deal with intractable problems
Broader recruitment and participation
On the design of study programmes and lifelong learning:
Basic knowledge in relevant areas of technology
Flexible and structured study paths
Developed lifelong learning
On support, administration, and quality development:
User oriented activity support
Quality systems for educational development
This spring work will broadly focus on and consolidate these principles. This will involve School Quality Councils and Management including School Faculty Assemblies, students, faculty programme directors at different levels, local and University Administration and the Central Collaboration Group. Finding good examples of activities that are already being performed at KTH within all the above principles such that we can learn from each other is one of the keys for success.
The thinking is that the Future Education Project should be synchronised with our six-year quality cycle and that broader working groups address different specific areas, sometimes from a longer and sometimes from a shorter perspective, and that the very high targets we have set, will have been reached by KTH’s Bicentenary in 2027.
The work we are doing on future education is attracting tremendous national and international interest. The next few years will both exciting and important.