Educational leadership and technology. Findings from surveys in Norway and Denmark.
Researchers presented a draft paper on educational leadership and technology for discussion at EAIR – The European Higher Education Society Linking research, policy and practice in Porto, Portugal 3.-6. September 2017.
Researchers from the project will be presenting some of the results at upcoming CHER and EARLI conferences.
From part B – researchers are presenting at the CHER conference in Jyväskylä at the end of August. The panel is titled “Quality work in higher education” and includes contributions from project researchers ithat focus on internal systems and practices for quality work, disciplinary differences as well as quality management in study programmes.
Researchers from the project part C will also be presenting results from the project during the EARLI conference in Tampere, Finland, at the end of August. Paper presentations in invited and organized symposiums will disseminate mainly findings from Part C of the project, on pedagogical approaches that generate quality in higher education teaching and learning.
The invited symposium of the Special Interest Group ‘Higher Education’ will contain the paper Innovating pedagogical designs for student-centered learning: teachers’ approaches and challenges, written in collaboration by colleagues from Oslo and Helsinki. Another paper, Interactional meaning-making of assessment feedback in undergraduate education, will present material from one of the Norwegian cases analyzed in Part C.
On 9th of June, Mari Elken held a talk at NIFUs annual conference on the theme “Can we measure quality in higher education?” (Kan vi måle kvalitet i høyere utdanning?)
The Danish team from CFA has conducted a survey among study programme leaders in Denmark. The survey mirrors the Norwegian survey that was conducted earlier in 2016. In particular, focus is on how study programme leaders engage in quality work.
Associate Professor Ebbe Krogh Graversen, CFA (Picture: CFA) from the Danish team comments:
Although the Nordic Higher Education system seems similar by many, it was surprising to find so many patterns of similarities between the Danish survey results and the comparable Norwegian survey. Furthermore, the detected differences seem to be explainable by differences in recent priorities, developments and reforms within Higher Education.
The Danish and Norwegian teams are currently working in further exploring the similarities and differences between the two surveys and some possible explanations for such patterns.
You can download the Danish survey here (pdf, in Danish).
View also the earlier published Norwegian survey results here (pdf, in Norwegian).
More detailed comparative analysis will be conducted in the coming months.
The Norwegian Ministry of Education and Research (Kunnskapsdepartementet) presented last Friday a new White Paper on quality in higher education. The white paper is titled “Culture for quality in higher education”.
On the occasion of the White Paper being launched a NIFU seminar was held on Monday. Agnete Vabø and Peter Maassen provided a research commentary during the seminar.
The state secretary for education, Bjørn Haugstad, first presented the White Paper, followed by a Vabø and Maassen as two researchers in the area of higher education providing a commentary based on their extensive expertise with studying governance and quality of higher education.
Later, they all joined a panel debate along with Curt Rice, rector at Oslo and Akershus University College, Ragnhild Hennum, pro-rector at University of Oslo, Marianne Andenæs, leader of the Norwegian Student Union and Terje Mørland, director of NOKUT. The debate was moderated by Sveinung Skule, director of NIFU.
Overall, the seminar highlighted that while there are a number of critical points that have been raised (for example, the emphasis on competition, questions of funding, coherence, implementation and so forth), several of the sector representatives also emphasized that the White Paper has not introduced drastic new measures and can be seen in many ways an expression of many of the processes that already take place in Norwegian higher education.