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...
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 10th Learning Forum was held from November 21-23 November, centered around the theme “building an inclusive and safe learning environment”, a theme that was very welcomed by staff members. The event started with an engaging keynote by Rie Hjørnegaard Malm from the department of Science Education, University of...
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....
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)...
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...
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...
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...
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,...
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...
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...
UNIS is this year celebrating its 30-year anniversary of Arctic education and research with a series of autumn events for the whole community of Longyearbyen. The previous week was designated as the jubilee week, which proved to be exceptionally busy due to three major events: a school visit, Researchers night...
The 3rd Student-Led Conference On Polar Environments (SCOPE) held at UNIS on October 13th and 14th, 2023, marked another year of the successful student-led conference. In total 102 students participated, with 9 local attendees joining the event on the open day, which took place on Saturday. The conference included 18...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
On August 22, 2023, bioCEED, in collaboration with SLATE (UiB’s Centre for the Science of Learning & Technology), hosted a full-day workshop, bringing together 19 instructors from across all departments in the faculty of Mathematics and Natural Sciences. Our primary goals were to share experiences with large language models (LLMs)...
A new bioCEED-initiated research project, “Gjennomføring 2023” (G23), has as its main purpose to understand psycho-social (e.g., sense of belonging) and experiential (e.g., welcome week, specific courses) levers to retention in the Faculty of Mathematics and Natural Sciences (MatNat). In short, when student leave, why do they leave? When...