Five leading technical universities in the Nordic region have teamed up to develop the quality of their study programmes.
Five leading technical universities in Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden have come up with their own way of running quality development on their study programmes so as to live up to their ambitions to strive constantly for improvements. Since 2009, the universities that make up the Nordic Five Tech Alliance (N5T) have been using what is known as ‘Peer Evaluation’, which involves allowing heads of studies, students and lecturers provide feedback to colleagues from the other universities within a related academic field.
The extraordinary aspect of this method is that it allows participants to talk openly about challenges and solutions to others in a similar situation. The method takes as its starting point a model that was originally implemented at DTU, and which is inspired by research evaluations. The model is actually one of the methods for rota evaluations of study programmes that is written into DTU’s institutional accreditation.
“Peer Evaluation draws a parallel to the world of research, where peer reviews are performed on scientific publications, and where researchers share academic advice with each other. We are now using this approach to compare and discuss study programmes at pan-Nordic level. It is hugely rewarding—both for the heads of studies involved, and for DTU,” explains Birgitte Lund Christiansen, who is responsible for Peer Evaluation and Head of Centre at LearningLab DTU.
She goes on to relate that the evaluation processes involve examining aspects such as recruiting students, establishing a shared identity on the study programmes, reinforcing student commitment, cohesion and progression through the study programme itself, and developing forms of teaching.
The same challenges
To date, N5T has evaluated 21 study programmes. One of them is Manufacturing and Management on DTU’s BEng programme. At the end of March, heads of studies, lecturers and students travelled from Lyngby to Stockholm to evaluate the Danish study programme with colleagues from the Mechanical Engineering programme at the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH).
The meeting ran for two days, where the team performed a SWOT analysis to define the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats in the study programmes. They also visited laboratories and student facilities.
Martin Edin Grimheden, Head of Studies for KTH’s study programme in mechanical engineering, relates:
“For us at KTH, it is important to be able to compare what we’re doing with other technical universities, and to receive new ideas and feedback on our current initiatives. The discussions between KTH and DTU have generated a lot of useful views and food for thought with regard to developing our study programmes. We have identified a fair few differences—and a lot of similarities—and it is these differences that inspire us to keep on developing.”