Managing our educational programmes
The theme for this year's management seminar was education
Dear staff
I hope that everyone has had a good summer and the opportunity to relax and enjoy the good weather – even though there have been both high temperatures and extreme incidents with heavy rainfall and strong winds.
There is a lot of talk about climate change and the need for more knowledge, but unfortunately we see declining interest among young people in studying science subjects, which can otherwise contribute to more knowledge.
Several of our programmes have taken in fewer students this year, with the faculty falling more than 10 % behind compared to last year. There can be many explanations for this – not least the smaller youth cohorts.
The theme for this year's management seminar, which has just been held, was education. More specifically, we discussed how we can strengthen the management of our education programmes. It will be very important that our programmes are attractive and of high quality in the coming years, when the youth cohorts continue to decrease.
Programme managers, teaching committees, lecturers and administrators lack time to develop the programmes and to implement the strategic initiatives in the faculty's strategy that we believe are necessary.
Thomas Harboe has written the book Everyday education management (together with Christian Tangkjær). He spoke at the management seminar about his experiences with educational management at universities, which is a complex and demanding field.
One of his points is that "best practice" and "one-size fits all" do not exist in educational management, while building relationships is one of the most important things.
This applies to relationships with the heads of department, with lecturers and with administrators – this takes time and requires contributions from everyone. In the management group, we will continue to work on this in the coming time.
To also get completely specific and get insight into how to work with the green transition in business, we also visited Greenlab in Skive. A business area has been laid out to attract companies that want to be part of the green transition.
The ambition is full recycling of all waste products and thus no emissions (e.g. gas, CO2). Greenlab connects the companies in the area, so that, for example, plastic from the recycling station is used by a company to make new products.
Or that biogas from a biogas plant based on waste products from agriculture is used to heat chemical compounds in another company, which cleans waste water for use in the production of hydrogen in a third company.
We were given an exciting tour by the two research engineers in Greenlab and talked about the various opportunities for students and researchers. It will be interesting to have Greenlab presented through our courses and to establish research and business projects in collaboration with them.
It can both contribute to future sustainable solutions and to attract students with an interest in the green transition to our programmes.
Marianne Holmer, dean