A busy visiting month for UNIS
March month is soon to end and, looking back, it has been a month filled with several visitors coming to UNIS. First out were Anders Ahlberg and Roy Andersson from the Faculty of Engineering, University of Lund in Sweden who both visited UNIS for the second time. Both are involved in the ongoing bioCEED Collegial Teaching Course in which six teachers from UNIS participate. As a part of the course a teaching portfolio workshop was held at UNIS, but the workshop was also open for other faculty members and 14 persons in total attended.
Anders and Roy held two other seminars for the staff at UNIS as well, one for the PhD students and post docs about “How to become a better teacher” and a lunch seminar for all staff at UNIS on what doctoral students’ early scientific talks and draft manuscripts could tell us about scientific thinking and science communication, and how generic skill development could be promoted. To watch the presentation click on the screenshot.
Another long traveled visitor from abroad was Sehoya Cotner from the University of Minnesota. She has together with her colleague Cissy Ballen initiated a research project at both UNIS and UiB (the COPUS project) and are mapping the teaching landscape at both biology departments. This semester three courses at the AB department have been video recorded and over 60 hours of lecturing are covered! The data will hopefully give some interesting insight in class behaviors of students and instructors.
During her stay at UNIS, Sehoya had three talks for staff and students at UNIS. A very relevant theme for UNIS was her talk on “Course-Based Undergraduate Research Experiences (CUREs) – Turn ALL Students Into Scientists” where CURE teaching is defined by the use of scientific practice, collaboration, iteration, discovery-based and should be broadly relevant. UNIS could possible be a good model and a place to study CURE. To watch this presentation click on the screenshot.
The UNIS students were also lucky to get a piece of Sehoya during her week stay. Mari and Malene, the student representatives, invited students to a meeting where Sehoya talked about “Gender-Equity in STEM: Do They Exist in Norway?” Surprising results (?) were presented from Sehoya and Cissy Ballens gender studies related to higher education showing lower participation during lectures among females than males and decreasing scientific confidence among females through the curriculum. This presentation raised many questions and thoughts in the audience and the results were afterwards discussed with the students.