Calls for changes in higher education are omnipresent and motivated by major challenges for society. Several of these challenges, for example those related to digitalization and sustainability, falls into the category of emerging and transformative challenges. The breadth and width of such challenges is too large to be handled by a single individual or even a small group of individuals. Instead, their solution requires an adaptive leadership with relevant activities at all organizational levels. From research literature and previous successful change processes, it is known that change leaders in the middle are key players during such transformations. In engineering education (and in fact in any other education aiming for a profession), it is natural that this role is taken by a program director who already has a responsibility for the quality and the development of an engineering program.  In this work, I will approach the role of a program director from a logical perspective using arguments based on a simple comparison between available time and total time required to create the desired change. It is obvious that large challenges demand a substantial amount of time to find an acceptable solution, which is outside of the reach for any single individual, I will also discuss the crucial role of persons in the middle for obtaining successful change related to large challenges. Finally, I will also try to give some answers to the question how a program director in the role as a person in the middle can survive in this pressing situation. I will point towards the needs for some competence in agile change management, the ability to create structures and collaborative efforts that promote agile actions, the need for making coherence and using inclusion strategies and the necessity of networking. I will also emphasize the importance that universities support internal and external networking structures.

Calls for changes in higher education are omnipresent and motivated by major challenges for society. Several of these challenges, for example those related to digitalization and sustainability, falls into the category of emerging and transformative challenges. The breadth and width of such challenges is too large to be handled by a single individual or even a small group of individuals. Instead, their solution requires an adaptive leadership with relevant activities at all organizational levels. From research literature and previous successful change processes, it is known that change leaders in the middle are key players during such transformations. In engineering education (and in fact in any other education aiming for a profession), it is natural that this role is taken by a program director who already has a responsibility for the quality and the development of an engineering program. In this work, I will approach the role of a program director from a logical perspective using arguments based on a simple comparison between available time and total time required to create the desired change. It is obvious that large challenges demand a substantial amount of time to find an acceptable solution, which is outside of the reach for any single individual. I will also discuss the crucial role of persons in the middle for obtaining successful change related to large challenges. Based on my own case, I will try to give some advice about how a program director in the role as a person in the middle can handle this pressing situation. I will point towards the needs of personal time management, a basic understanding of agile change management, the ability to create structures and collaborative efforts that promote agile actions, the need for making coherence and using inclusion strategies and the necessity of networking. I will also emphasize the importance that universities support internal and external networking structures.

Restrictions during the pandemic has forced teachers to replace traditional classroom exams with home exams, which are either proctored by digital tools or non-proctored. In this work, I describe the student response from using non-proctored digital home exams in two university courses in physics. In particular, the advantages and disadvantages of this approach will be discussed, since there are major concern about grading students based on non-proctored exams due to issues related to authenticity and cheating. Finally, I will reflect on the future use of non- proctored exams to evaluate knowledge in physics.

Kvalitet i högre utbildning förutsätter ett kontinuerligt och hållbart engagemang för pedagogiskutveckling bland lärare och ledning. Universitetsledningens intentioner framgår i de styrdokument,handlingsplaner och visioner som tas fram på lärosätet och innehåller som regel fina ord omutbildningens betydelse även vid forskningstunga institutioner. Det är svårare att skaffa sig en bild avden undervisande personalens bild av detta, dels för att de flesta av dem inte är inkluderade idiskussionerna och dels för att det kan finnas ett gap mellan de frågor som lärare ser som relevantaoch de frågor ledningen är intresserad av att driva.Åren 2014-2016 genomförde KTH en satsning för att bredda det pedagogiska engagemanget ochminska avståndet mellan universitetets högskolepedagoger och övriga lärare genom att utsepedagogiskt intresserade lärare till pedagogiska utvecklare på deltid. Några av dessa pedagogiskautvecklare utvecklade en enkät för att undersöka hur den undervisande personalen såg på en radfrågor relaterade till arbetssituation, förutsättningar för eget och kollegialt lärande, undervisningensmeritvärde och tankar om nuvarande och framtida pedagogik. Undersökningen var också tänkt attutifrån ett kollegialt perspektiv utforska hur lärarna såg på den faktiska situationen jämfört med derasidealbild av universitetspedagogik och universitetsarbete. Tanken var även att följa utvecklingenlongitudinellt för att identifiera trender och resultat av pedagogiska satsningar. Enkäten har hittillsskickats ut två gånger, 2016 (2240 respondenter, 20,0% svarsfrekvens) och 2019 (2534 respondenter,16,8% svarsfrekvens).Vi kommer i vårt bidrag att redovisa några av de intressantare resultaten från undersökningarna ochdiskutera implikationerna av dessa både för lärare och för universitetsledning. Vi finner att det blandrespondenterna finns ett starkt pedagogiskt intresse och en tendens till ökat kollegialt samarbete kringpedagogik, något som i litteraturen lyfts fram som ett tecken på framgångsrika mikrokulturer. Det finnsockså en konstant syn på att universitetet inte gör tillräckligt för att stödja och premiera pedagogisktarbete och ett relativt svagt förtroende för universitetets pedagogiska ledarskap men också förstudenternas pedagogiska engagemang. Vi kommer också att lyfta fram studien som en potentiellmodell för gräsrotsdrivna pedagogiska initiativ och redogöra för den speciella arbetsgång som liggerbakom vårt arbete. Inför framtiden visar vi också på de effekter det kan tänkas få, exempelvis genomatt permanentas som en del av universitetets kvalitetssäkringsarbete. Sist men inte minst kommer viatt betona vikten av att lärarnas åsikter kopplas till studenternas upplevelser av lärmiljöer och till derasmöjligheter att reellt bidra till det pedagogiska förändringsarbetet vid universitetet.

Jag och mina kollegor upplever att många studenter idag inte går på föreläsningar eller deltar i annan undervisning på grundkurser. När de sedan efter kursens slut tillfrågas hur många timmar de har lagt ned på densamma, är det många som anger ett timantal som ligger under det som förväntas av dem enligt kursens poängtal. Samtidigt ser vi att tentamensresultaten försämras. Detta leder i sin tur till en låg genomströmning eller i allra värsta fall till att kurskraven sänks. Här visar jag ett illustrativa exempel på hur kursaktivitet korrelarar med tentamensresultat, redovisar vad jag har funnit i forskningslitteraturen om detta samt ställer frågan vad vi som lärare bör göra för att förbättra situationen.

This full paper presentation starts with the understanding that in the present-day audit society, in which most academics also find themselves, assessment and probing are usually done from positions of higher authority, and not always with quality improvement as the main driving force. In the context of teaching and learning in higher education, this can result in pedagogical evaluations that seem to take uncalled-for interest in areas of little concern to teachers, potentially omitting areas of greater interest to them. In contrast, this paper describes the process and outcomes of a grass-roots initiative to assess the experiences and attitudes toward teaching and learning at the university among peers. 

In 2014, a university-financed project was launched at KTH Royal Institute of Technology to engage more teachers in the university’s educational development work. The university initially selected 24 self-nominated teachers who were given relatively free reins to work on educational development projects. This project was one of them.

The assessment took the form of a survey targeting all teaching – or potentially teaching – faculty at the university, carried out first in 2016 and then repeated in 2019. The first survey was sent out to 2,204 respondents, and the second to 2,534 respondents, with response rates of 20% and 17% respectively. This paper will describe the process of designing these surveys, looking at what was asked about and what was not asked about, as well as the process of getting internal approval for sending them out to a survey-fatigued faculty. The paper also reports on the results in terms of both some key findings and in terms of the effect of the survey work itself on different stakeholders and potential agents of change at the university. Most importantly, however, this paper will discuss the conditions and prerequisites for grass-roots initiatives such as this to succeed, based on the literature and on the experiences gained through the survey work. Grounded in this discussion, we will suggest strategies to help teachers at other universities successfully repeat this or similar endeavours.

Students and teachers are minor actors in top-down managed educational quality assurance systems, but they are also the main actors when it comes to create bottom-up educational quality enhancement in practice. It is well established historically that educational change processes have been hard to manage and that trustful relations between management and teachers are required to create sustainable change. However, so far students are seldom included in these processes.

Here, we present a good example of a bottom-up strategy for student-teacher interaction with the focus on enhancing programme quality while keeping a trustful relation both between students and teachers and between teachers themselves. At the heart of this strategy lies a regular short programme level student questionnaire, where students are encouraged to write down whatever opinions they have about their courses and about their study programme. The responses are jointly evaluated by the programme director and student representatives with the aim of bringing issues or innovative ideas to the appropriate forum for further discussions. We will describe the questionnaire and the quality enhancement strategy together with some results of actual change created so far. In a wider scope, we will also discuss the complementarity of a bottom-up driven quality enhancement process and the usual top-down driven quality assurance process. Finally, we shortly reflect on the role of the student questionnaire for creating trust among students and teacher during a change process.

Adaptability, innovation and efficiency are core engineering skills that students have to acquire to keep pace in a fast-changing world. It is therefore important that change processes in engineering education reflect and promote these skills. Further, as stated by e.g. the Standards and Guidelines for Quality Assurance in the European Higher Education Area (ESG, 2015) and the CDIO Standard 12 (2010), efficient assurance, enhancement and evaluation of educational quality is vital. However, change and quality management within universities are often slow and unwieldy (Graham, 2012; Kamp, 2016). Despite being the manifesto of engineering education, systematic problem solving is rarely incorporated into program organization and development. We have applied the CDIO concept to create a new, sustainable line of communication between students and faculty, in the form of a short program level student questionnaire where the results are used as input to further discussion. Key concepts in the design of our method have been collaboration between students and faculty, iterative feedback loops, and simultaneous bottom-up and top-down work by student representatives and the program director, respectively. These approaches have minimized the risk of failure and delay as well as actively utilized the creative power of the student body. In the questionnaire, distributed four times per year, students can anonymously share any opinions about the program. The program director and a student representative work together to evaluate the responses, immediately forwarding feedback to the correct recipient. Students are informed about key outcomes, to ensure a trustful relationship between them and the faculty and promote active participation. With our method, issues are detected and handled at an early stage, allowing the focus within the program to remain on education, innovation and quality enhancement. In this work, we will detail our methodology for streamlining communication as characterized by the engineering methods taught at universities. We will demonstrate some results obtained so far in improving time-efficiency of quality management, through active student representation and trustful faculty dialogue. Still being in the early stages of operation, we will also reflect on the future outlook of our strategy. Finally, we will discuss the benefits of utilizing the CDIO concept for implementing change processes in higher engineering education.

Detta bidrag beskriver och analyserar förberedelsefasen inför implementeringen av ett högskolepedagogiskt excellensprogram vid Kungliga Tekniska Högskolan, KTH. Programmet syftar till att ytterligare stärka värdet av pedagogiska meriter och samtidigt bidra till lärosätets fortsatta och fördjupade utveckling av utbildningarna och organisationen. De tydligaste riskerna som har identifierats med befintliga pedagogiska meriteringsmodeller är att de kan skapa ett A- och B-lag (mellan en karriär som forskare och en karriär som lärare). Dessutom är det ofta oklart hur personer som har utnämnts till excellenta lärare ska kunna bidra till organisationens och utbildningens utveckling ur ett kortsiktigt såväl som ett långsiktigt perspektiv. En tydlig svaghet med befintliga pedagogiska meriteringsmodeller är att de inte explicit nog ger emfas till aktivt och relevant utvecklingsarbete, utan fokuserar på egenhändigt skrivna pedagogiska portföljer som sällan är framtidsinriktade. KTH:s högskolepedagogiska excellensprogram siktar på att försöka möta dessa risker och svagheter. KTH har, alltjämt sedan det nationella obligatoriet om 15 hp Högskolepedagogik infördes, kvarhållit detta obligatorium. Stora satsningar har gjorts på den högskolepedagogiska verksamheten. Ett gediget utbud av fortbildningsmöjligheter samt arenor för nätverkande har utvecklats. Samtidigt råder svagheter i systemet gällande prövande och tillvaratagande av pedagogisk skicklighet, och det är tydligt att KTH behöver ytterligare utveckling i området. Författarna menar också att i och med att de utmaningar vi står inför gällande pedagogisk meritering ser relativt lika ut vid landets lärosäten, bör ett stärkt nationellt samarbete och nätverkande inom landets ingenjörsutbildningar främjas inom området. Artikelförfattarna representerar KTH:s övergripande ledning, utbildningsledning samt ledningen för den högskolepedagogiska verksamheten.

We present two methodologies to assess the use of mathematics in a study programme. Firstly, we use a relatively simple methodology to assess how students show their ability to use mathematics in their degree project reports. Secondly, we present a methodology to assess how mathematics is used during a study programme. We have applied the first methodology on the mathematics content in 114 randomly chosen bachelor degree reports from 6 different study programmes within the fields of electrical engineering and computer engineering at KTH. For the 3-year bachelor degree programmes in computer engineering, we find clear deficits in the way students use mathematics in their bachelor degree reports as compared to the other programmes in our study. Through the second methodology, we were able to relate the deficits in the bachelor degree reports to a programme structure where skills in mathematics have not been sufficiently demanded in the engineering courses of the programme.