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...
The 2020 Annual Report was finalized and shared with the bioCEED board and our funders at Diku. Feel free to read the report in its entirety here, or just the brief summary that follows. bioCEED was bolstered by new investigators and new initiatives. For example, a teaching assistant (TA) training...
For the second time, bioCEED has held a pedagogical two-day course for teaching assistants (TA) at BIO. This is a continuation of the previous TA course. However, based on feedback from the participants, as well as teachers at BIO, we have tried to improve the course by providing better examples...
The workshops “Engaging students during remote instruction” took place at BIO and UNIS in January- February and involved more than 60+ teachers across BIO and UNIS. When teachers at BIO, due to current regulations, had to postpone their annual Teachers Retreat (once again!), they went digital and made a Teacher’s...
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...
Statistics course tend to focus on teaching statistics. However, as students soon learn when they start analysing their Masters or PhD thesis data, statistical analysis is typically only a minor component of any data analysis project. Data wrangling – importing, cleaning, and reformatting – often takes far longer and needs...
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...
In November, more than 40 teachers at BIO joined in the digital teacher meeting to sum up our experiences from this semester with online and hybrid teaching. We all recognize that it has been a different semester, due to the Covid 19 restrictions which have been rapidly changing back and...
MOL-203 Gene structure and Function is known amongst molecular biology students as an interesting, but challenging course. This is the last semester the course runs, before it will be renewed and return as an introductory molecular biology course. But this didn’t mean that the current students didn’t need help before...
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...
More than 100 students, teachers and staff attended the BIO Fall 2020 Student Poster Symposium. Every semester, students at BIO present posters of their scientific work at a poster symposium. Many students have been conducting projects as part of their courses during this semester, in which they participated in workshops...
Taking microscopy pictures with a smartphone is quite common at the teaching lab. Students often use their favorite electronical device for documenting observations and illustrating their journals or their Instagram feed. Taking pictures directly through the eyepiece of a microscope isn’t that difficult, to be honest. However, taking good pictures...
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...
Monday the 26th of October 2020, three excited student representatives from bioCEED Bergen arrived at Svalbard Airport. We were looking forward to spending the subsequent week 78° North at the annual Learning Forum at UNIS. Coincidentally this day was also the first day of the Polar night, where the sun...