Wednesday the 6th of March, a networking-seminar with the SFUs was held at Scandic Hotel Flesland in Bergen, with DIKU as a host. bioCEED was well represented at the meeting, and had four student representatives there.
bioCEED was on their toes as usual, here represented by Oddfrid T. Kårstad Førland and Vigdis Vandvik who delivered a good presentation during the segment “Distribution: presentations of good practice from the SFUs”. Photo Ørjan Vabø
After the takeover of the SFU initiative by DIKU from NOKUT, there were many good discussions of how DIKU could keep up the progression with the SFU initiative. There was also a big focus on how distribution and communication from the SFUs should be solved, and workshops were held. In these workshops, you could – together with representatives from other SFUs discuss which channels of communication are the best for the different target audiences. You could also discuss how the knowledge that has been collected over the years as an SFU can help other institutions improve their methods of teaching and learning, both domestic and internationally, or to help “SFU-sprouts” in the progress of applying. We also had time for some casual talk in the breaks, as well as for refilling the glass with sparkling water (which I appreciated very much).
Towards the end of the day, the student representatives from the SFUs CEMPE, MatRIC, ProTED and bioCEED gathered, and discussed how the students could improve their collaboration. Here we shared experiences, and multiple great ideas in terms of continued and improved collaboration between the student representatives were brought up. The main goal with this improvement, is to make it easier for student representatives to keep in touch, share experiences, and give each other inspiration to new learning activities for the students. It will also make the jump into the job as a student representative smoother, as you can get an overview on how the respective SFU works, as well as the whole SFU network. This is very helpful, especially at UNIS, where there is a high turnover-rate of students, and you usually only have a couple of weeks to get to know your tasks and the whole SFU network (which may seem overwhelming at the start).Thus – in this small meeting – a great leap has been taken in terms of a better cooperation between the student representatives from the different SFUs. Hopefully, there will be more network-seminars for student representatives as well, to further strengthen the cooperation.
The dinner was great – and “Instagram worthy”. The picture shows the appetizer of the day, and reflects the quality of the seminar itself. Photo Ørjan Vabø
The day was finished off with a great meal, spiced up with great conversations with representatives from other participating SFUs – a great final touch to the seminar.
Author: Ørjan Vabø, UNIS student representative