Knut is already very familiar with most areas of the Faculty’s work with education through his role as project leader for the educational development project InterAct. This work will continue, but Knut will also take over the other duties associated with the position as Dean of Education and Studies.
There are many educational challenges to enter into. One of them is a revision of our portfolio of course modules and their structure. This is a major task that has been postponed because other more pressing undertakings have had to be addressed. Towards the summer we also have to work to gain more insight into the dropout and retention rates for our educations. The Ministry of Education are obviously concerned about these numbers, and the Vice Rector for Education has asked us to collect information that can help in understanding the numbers. Based on this it should also be possible to arrive at measures that can improve the numbers, where needed.
Education administration is an important part of working with education. The annual seminar for the administrative staff both at the faculty level and from the departments took place February 13–14. At the seminar it was clearly expressed that we should exploit the good collaborative environment to improve the efficiency and standardisation of administrative routines. The primary motivation is to provide a better service to the students, which also leads to more time and resources for other tasks.
Solveig has a major focus on the life science initiative, including the new building, as well as the University’s development of a road map for research infrastructure. These are demanding and important processes that are closely related. In addition, after discussions with the department heads, the deans have decided that the time is right for a broad and focused commitment to data science and computational science at the Faculty. You will find more about this in Morten’s newsletter.
Development of the researcher education is another important area, including initiatives to train our PhD supervisors. This will be the theme of a joint seminar with the PhD Council and the heads of education from the different departments on April 26. In particular, we will discuss the course modules offered to the PhD candidates and how we can work together to develop this.
Let us finally mention the work with the University’s masterplan for IT which was just completed. The Faculty has been well represented in this work which includes a major and groundbreaking plan for addressing IT and digitisation for all the different areas of UiO. The master plan will be on the agenda of the University Board’s meeting in May — this will provide a framework for taking this work forward. More about this in a future newsletter!