Conference opening
Room: University Aula
Time: Wednesday, 17.30
The conference is opened by the Norwegian Minister of Research and Higher Education Iselin Nybø, the ISSOTL President Mills Kelly, and the conference hosts.
How Norway went SoTL
Presented by: Helen Bråten with friends Mari Bjordal, Ragnhild Gya, Sondre Spjeld, Oddrun Samdal, Håkon Randgaard Mikalsen and Øyvind Fiksen
Room: University Aula
Time: Wednesday, 17.30-19.00
The opening keynote will describe and analyze the rapidly growing collegial quality culture in Norwegian Higher Education, supported by testimonials from some of the key stakeholders.
In January 2017 the Norwegian Ministry of Education and Research launched the White paper Culture for quality in higher education. The white paper motivates the need for a culture shift to promote the quality of higher education in Norway, and outlines five main strategies and a series of actions towards this goal. Together, these strategies share many of the underlying ideas and perspectives of the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning movement, including development and use of evidence-based teaching and learning methods, promoting student-centered perspectives and practices, and growing a collegial quality culture in higher education. This requires seeing educational quality as a joint responsibility and development as joint venture, where teacher, students and management are partners in a community that develops a quality culture. It also entails bringing the best characteristics of the well-established research culture into the teaching and learning culture.
But a cultural change does not magically emerge simply because a decree is issued by the government. While the development of a culture of quality must be supported from above, but it grows from the bottom up, through the teachers, students, and educational support staff. Here SoTL can guide the way. Therefore, we explore what a quality culture of teaching and learning looks like from the policy, institutional, student and teacher perspective?
In this keynote, we will get broad overview over how Norway is now moving towards a collegial learning culture. This will be interspersed with first-hand testimonials from teachers and students in Norway, tied together by the director of The Norwegian Agency for Quality Assurance in Education.
Helen Bråten has been the Project Manager for the Norwegian Centres for Excellence in Education, at NOKUT (the Norwegian Agency for Quality Assurance in Education). NOKUT is an independent expert body under the Ministry of Education and Research, and seeks to enhance and assure quality in Norwegian higher and teritiary vocational education, as well as formally recognize foreign education qualifications.
