National award to KTH Vehicles Programme
KTH´s Vehicle Engineering Programme was one of the undergraduate programmes that were awarded the title of ”Centre of Excellent Quality in Higher Education” in 2007 – one out of five such national awards given by the Swedish National Agency for Higher Education. This distinction is meant to identify teaching efforts at national level of a specially high quality.
The five awards for 2007 are given to KTH´s Vehicle Engineering Programme, to the Physicians´ Programme as well as to the varied programmes in Control Engineering at Linköping University, to the Dentists´ Programme at Malmö University, and to the Dept. of Historical Studies at Umeå University.
These environments are deemed worthy of extra praise as they possess a strong teaching consist, partly from their systematic attention to elements of quality assurance. The active student influence on the process is substantial, too, says the National Agency; in addition, senior teachers are devoting extra effort to supporting their junior colleagues.
All five of these are model examples, for giving inspiration to domestic as well as foreign teaching bodies. They were able to describe and analyse their own success factors, too, as well as present their programmes in a clear and consistent manner, when they were visited by the assessment group sent out by the National Agency.
A total of 26 applications were filed for these awards; from 2008 onwards they will be granted every year. Judgements were delivered by an international panel consisting of scholars from Finland, Portugal, United Kingdom and Germany, who also visited a number of the applicants´ working environments before arriving on their decisions.