Lo and behold, this spring it finally happened: The students in the Arctic Environmental Management Course (AB-203) confirmed that the UNIS course had a “clear red line”. AB-203 used to have a lot of topics and many guest lecturers visiting UNIS, and as a result struggled to follow a red...
Læringsfestivalen is an important arena for teachers and others who are involved and interested in teaching and educational development and where people can exchange knowledge, experiences and educational research results. The festival is organized by NTNU and Diku and this year it went fully digitally with well above 200 participants...
Hurra, UNISprout is back, and it is better than ever! Are you wondering what UNISprout is all about? Here’s a quick overview of the project: UNISprout is a bioCEED funded project, designed to support the planned fieldwork of Guest Master and PhD students by offering Bachelor students the opportunity to...
The International Society for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning invites you to join its 17th annual conference, which will be hosted virtually from Perth, Western Australia from October 26 to 29, 2021. The theme of ISSOTL21 is Sustainable Education through SoTL: Practices and Cultures, selected to call our attention...
As I have previously discussed, I was part of a three-person team of Associate Editors tasked with managing the submissions to this Special Issue: Taking Learning Online in Ecology and Evolution. The first installment was released late last week, and the second volume of contributions came out in April. For...
It’s been a full year since most of the world went into lockdown. Since then we have all been more or less living in the virtual world. For many students there lives have been filled with online learning from their living rooms. For many teachers this lead to a total...
This focus for the MNT2021 (STEM) Conference was on sustainability and how this perspective can contribute to increase quality in education and teaching. The MNT conference is held every second year and the 2-days event was hosted by the University of Agder this year. However, due to the ongoing corona...
My name is Timon and I work at the University Centre in Svalbard at the AB department as a technician. Here I am working with both the FieldPass project and in bioCEED. Currently I work with developing an e-learning platform for Arctic Biology students and staff (www.learningarcticbiology.info) and with developing mini e-courses with certification in the end. The aim of both these projects...
A new Teaching & Learning course for PhD students, postdocs and master students with teaching responsibilities has recently been launched by bioCEED and iEarth at UNIS. It was an intense 3-days session for eight participants, full of active learning, discussions and sharing the experience of tackling challenging situations during fieldwork. So, how was it? During the first day of the course the participants explored some central theories and concepts of learning. They also discussed the difference between roles of presenter and facilitator in...
The ISSOTL conference 2021 from February 24-26 was held digitally, a result of covid-19. This gave several teachers at UNIS the chance to participate online. After some initial confusion concerning mean Greenwich time, and how again this is related to Norwegian timekeeping, I found my way through the program. According...
A new semester has started here at UNIS, and on that occasion bioCEED have gotten two new student representatives on their team! We are both third year biology students from the University of Bergen, who have come to Svalbard to finish the last semester of our bachelor’s degree. We are...
Sehoya Cotner will be taking up the position as the new director of bioCEED in 2021. Sehoya comes from the University of Minnesota, where she is an associate professor in the Department of Biology Teaching and Learning. As a professor II with bioCEED since 2016, she knows both bioCEED and...
Diku has decided to extend the SFUs CCSE, ENgage and Exited as Centre for Excellence in Education by five additional years. Read the case from Diku here.
At BIO we are now in the process of redesigning our bachelor programme in biology. This is done through the DIKU-founded project “Student active learning in the (re)design of the biology education”, which is a collaboration between bioCEED, BIO and the UiB Learning lab. An important tool for this work...
bioCEED and iEarth are in the planning stage for a new 3-days teaching and learning course at UNIS this spring. This course mainly aims to provide PhD students at UNIS with some basic learning theory and concepts, practical approaches, tools and skills for classroom and field teaching. The course is...
Christmas is right around the corner, and we are all looking forward to a little cozy break. After two months of employment, we are well underway with different tasks. One of the first tasks we took on was to find a less tongue twisting name than the title research technicians...
SCOPE – Student-led Conference on Polar Education … Excitement … Engagement Get ready for the first-ever student-led conference at 78° North in October 2021! Having studied in the Arctic for a while, we students of the North all share this excitement and spirit to understand and...
This pandemic has focused the energies of many educators in ecology and evolutionary biology disciplines on a central question: how do we safely, effectively, and equitably adapt the way we teach, learn, and collaborate during this crisis? The editors at Ecology and Evolution responded by providing a forum for us...
The arctic winter is approaching our little community and will soon fully embrace the daily life of the students. To break up the moody vibes a bit, the bioCEED student representatives Christina and Daniela at UNIS organized the traditional unisBREAKFAST. Once again students at the University Center in Svalbard UNIS...
In November, Vigdis Vandvik, Lucas Jeno and other critical voices were invited to a NOKUT seminar to discuss future developments of Studiebarometeret. This was based on a previous written op-ed in Khrono back in Febrauary where bioCEED demanded a “full revolution” of the Norwegian national student questionnaire Studiebarometeret. The reason...