To 2018 and beyond!

Last week we got an early Christmas present when the NOKUT board decided to extend bioCEEDs status as a Centre for Excellence in Education by five additional years! The decision was made after an extensive interim evaluation (which you can read about here, here and here!), a process that has been both challenging and rewarding – and has taken much of our attention in 2017. We are extremely pleased to have many more years as SFU, and are especially glad that our SFU siblings MatRIC and CEMPE will also be joining us in a second period!

The evaluation report from the interim evaluation committee gave us valuable feedback and suggestions for our future work. Also, we highly appreciate the fair amount of praise they gave us. We would like to thank NOKUT and the committee for all their feedback during the whole evaluation process. If you would like to read the full report, you can find it here.

The praise we got for our achievements I would like to forward to the excellent students, teachers and staff at UiB, UNIS and IMR that work very hard every day to make (biology) education excellent!

When we now take a well-deserved break, we look forward to many exciting events in 2018. Our PhD student Lucas Jeno will defend his thesis early in 2018, new projects will start up and old projects will develop further, and in October, we will host ISSOTL2018!

On behalf of bioCEED I wish you all a Merry Christmas, a peaceful holiday and a happy new year!

Vigdis Vandvik