bioCEED news

bioCEED 10 Year Anniversary Seminar

BioCEED is inviting you to celebrate our 10-year anniversary! March 6th, 12:00-17:00, in the University Aula, UiB.  Register here At the anniversary seminar we will share some of what we have learnt through 10 years of educational development and educational research. The seminar will end with a reception with refreshments. The main focus will be…

bioCEED at ten years: the end of an era

It is with mixed feelings that we reflect on the end of an era, as bioCEED will no longer be officially an SFU effective 31 December. While we are sad about the end and still not completely clear about the future, we can be positive and proud of what we have accomplished. At UiB and…

Virtual Field Guides update from UNIS

This semester has been busy with developing more virtual field guides for new locations at Svalbard and adding on information and upgrading old locations. Four new field guide locations are under construction and will hopefully be ready to use by the end of the year including one marine site in Billefjorden!  During the terrestrial Arctic biology course…

Students’ activity fall 2023

This autumn semester students had many possibilities in engaging and learning additionally to the course offers. UNISbreakfast ran three times where students could participate in and learn about other students’ experiences. The invited speakers were mainly PhD students working on their project and talking about their carrier experiences so far. Take away messages, such as…

9th Annual BIO Teachers’ Retreat

group photo of the Teachers Retreat participants at Scandic Voss

  The 9th annual BIO Teachers’ Retreat sponsored by bioCEED took place at Voss Nov 30th – Dec 1st, 2023.  A total of 50 teachers and staff participated in the workshops and discussions.   The first day was dedicated to the main topic of the retreat: supervision. Robert Kordts (UPED, UiB) introduced the topic and led…

bioCEED invasion at ISSOTL conference 2023

Group picture of the participants from bioCEED and friends

bioCEED can boast a strong presence at the ISSOTL 2023 meeting in Utrecht, Netherlands. Members of our team that attended include Tina Dahl, Roy Andersson, Oddfrid Førland, Sehoya Cotner, Kristin Holtermann, Sigrunn Eliassen, Anne Bjune, Ståle Ellingsen, Jonathan Soule, Ruben Thormodsæter, Cecilie Boge, Jorun Nylehn, and Christian Strømme. We led panel discussions, presented posters and…

“Large Language Models in Education” Project Updates

Photo of the workshop on LLMs at UNS showing Ståle Ellingsen, discussing with the workshop participants.

We’ve been busy. Our first report is now out, and we have had two more workshops and two recent talks. In mid-November, we met with 15 UNIS staff to discuss the challenges and opportunities associated with the use of Large Language Models (LLMs) such as chatGPT. The day concluded with each participant presenting an implementation plan…

Bikuben Volume 2 is out!

Cover page of Bikuben Student journal Volume 2 showing a photo by Joan J. Soto Angel of a potential new species of Ptychogastria collected on board OceanX cruise”

Bikuben’s editorial board is extremely proud and happy to introduce the second edition of Bikuben Student Journal. This 74-page edition features the 6 student peer-reviewed articles listed further below, which were published online during the academic year 2022/23. The topics range widely, from ecology to fisheries and marine biology, cancer research and genetics, and more.…

Student Poster Symposium at BIO, Autumn 2023

Poster presentations at Vilvite during the Student Poster Symposium Fall 2023

150 students from 5 BIO courses presented in total 50 posters at the Student Poster Symposium at Vil Vite, Tuesday Nov 28th 2023. The students presented their work in the form of 60 second-pitches in the auditorium, before discussing their posters during the two following viewing sessions. In this event, we witnessed a great diversity…

Motivasjon under eksamensperioden

Selv om det ikke var fullt hus, så Lucas Jeno fullt tilstede med et tydelig budskap: «Dette er ikke et «Go big or go home»-seminar, men et seminar hvor personlig vekst står sentralt.» Torsdag 16.november ble det holdt motivasjonsseminar for studenter og ansatte ved Institutt for Biovitenskap som en av de siste, men kanskje viktigste…

A simple three-part form, but very valuable feedback…

The UNIS students have been actively attending student-led conferences and breakfast seminars and getting help to study for their exams in between lectures the last couple of weeks. SCOPE, the student-led conference, drew the participation of numerous students, with some presenting posters and others delivering brief talks. Meanwhile, the popular UNISbreakfast sessions featured PhD students…

Student seminar – future careers for biologists

The student event “Veien til Arbeidslivet” (the Path to Working life), held at the MatNat student bar Integrerbar, was a remarkable success with an audience of 70 enthusiastic students. The event was organised by bioBEE and Gina Koulibaly Barry and hosted by Gina and Silje Maria Midthjell Høydal. The highlight of the event was the…

Research article from FieldPass on certification: Show me how to use a microscope!

Screenshot of the first page of Eidesen et al. 2023 - “Show me how to use a microscope” – The development and evaluation of certification as direct assessment of practical lab skills

Many natural science courses in higher education emphasize practical skills, yet these skills are often not directly assessed. In a recently published study from the Department of BioSciences, UiO,  Department of Arctic Biology, UNIS and Department of Biological Sciences, UiB, the potential of using certification as an assessment tool for practical lab skills is explored.…

Towards the end for the Centres for Excellence in Education in Norway?

A proposal for Norway’s National Budget for 2024 was presented to the Storting on 6 October 2023 (see the webpage of the government here). It is with great concern that we learn about the proposed shutdown of the initiative that supports the Centre for Excellence in Education (Sentre for Fremragende Utdanning – SFU) 10 years…

bioCEEDster: Ragnhild Gya

I am back! My name is Ragnhild Gya, and I used to be a student representative for bioCEED at UiB back in 2015-2017. Since then, I have been semi-involved in different bioCEED projects while I did my PhD in plant ecology at UiB. In June 2023 I started my postdoc in biology didactics at UiB,…

bioCEED survey 2023

We are repeating the bioCEED survey that was conducted in 2015 and 2018. All major universities and university colleges in Norway with biology and biology-related programs have been invited to participate. This time the recipients are students, and we have updated the survey with some new topics. The survey was sent out to the selected…

New research article on course content relevance and student motivation

abstract of the article written by Johansen and colleagues entitled "Why is this relevant for me?”: increasing content relevance enhances student motivation and vitality"

A new study has been published by bioCEED members Marius Ole Johansen, Lucas M. Jeno, and Sigrunn Eliassen. In this experiment, students were either given a generic data set and instructions to work on, or a real-world data set and instructions. The students were asked to use the programming software R to calculate different statistical…