A year with a new education strategy
For a year, the faculty has been working with the new education strategy for the period from 2021 to 2025. Of course, our study programmes are central to this work, and therefore an actual education strategy was drawn up.
The mission for the education strategy is that our graduates must be both competent and aware of their skills, so that they are attractive to the job market and can contribute to society.
We already have some very strong study programmes with a towering professionalism. The graduates are in demand, and the students generally give very positive assessments of the study environment. Nevertheless, we still have some challenges that we would like to address.
Some of the programmes are challenged by the fact that too many of the graduates take too long to find their first job. It is a big problem for the individual, but it is also expensive for the faculty, as it leads to dimensioning of these programmes. Other programmes are tormented by too many students – in some programmes more than half – dropping out without completing the programme, even though there is a need for graduates with just their competences. Finally, we also have a challenge with many students feeling stressed.
Therefore, we have placed a focus on skills, including both core professional skills and a number of complementary skills. The key is that the graduates must be aware of their skills – both the professional skills and the generally academic and personal skills.
With a focus on skills in their studies, we expect the students to become more aware of their own qualifications and better at expressing them. Therefore, it will be easier for them to get their feet in the door of the job market after their graduation. At the same time, this focus can also lead to more clarity about the purpose and relevance of the programme and thus counteract dropouts and stress.
In working with the strategy, the Education Committee, in collaboration with the departments' teaching committees, has worked to define the most important non-core professional skills. In particular, there has been a clear consensus in four areas, namely communication, creativity, interdisciplinarity and self-management, but there are many more, each of which means a lot for the individual programmes. Right now we are working on designing an electronic skills portfolio, which will be a common framework for the students in the individual programmes.
Another area of the strategy is greater involvement of stakeholders, ie. the students themselves, external experts of various kinds, and companies. We are thus working to establish a closer contact with the business community, which should be invited to be a part of our teaching to a greater extent, just as we would like to be able to offer more students a stay in a company during their course of study.