Quality of education

Course representative meetings

As a complement to the course evaluations, we have course representative meetings four times each semester (twice per course period). This is to get instant feedback, find out about possible problems and get information from IBG out to the students.

Meetings concerning our biology programmes are usually led by the director of studies, the study counsellor and/or the Information officer at IBG. Meetings concerning the engineering program and the master programmes in bioinformatics and molecular biotechnology are usually led by the program coordinator and the degree project coordinators from IBG. For our biology programmes, two students from each course are selected as course representatives when the course starts. These students get opinions regarding the course from their fellow students and and report these on our course information meetings. The meetings take place during lunch at the beginning and end of each course period, so that everyone can participate. The meetings are given in both Swedish and English as we have many exchange and Masters students from other countries. Students studying the engineering programme choose course representatives for the entire semester.

During the meetings we inform students about what is going on at IBG (e.g., new courses, etc.) and then get each course representative to say something about how things are working on their course. If it turns out that there are problems (eg difficulties to get hold of textbooks, schedule problems, etc.), we try to fix them as soon as possible to improve the course. We also have representatives from the local student organization at each meeting.

Course evaluations

One important part of our continuous quality work related to courses are the course evaluations. These evaluations are done during each course.

The teacher responsible for the course conducts course evaluations. Normally, there should be scheduled time for completion of the evaluation of the course. The teacher responsible for the course can freely formulate questions to get suggestions of improvement for the course, but overall there should be (1) a question regarding the students' overall assessment of the course, (2) an opportunity for the students to describe what was especially good with the course, and (3) one or more points where students can suggest improvements.

The program coordinator compile all course evaluations for each course period in a brief report to present in the programme advisory board. The faculty has several such boards, for example one for bachelor and master programmes in chemistry, biology and earth science. The report provides the overall assessment (point 1 above), and involves a brief comment from the teacher responsible for the course or program coordinator (focusing on what worked well and what could be improved). The program advisory board provides feedback to the program coordinator which will be informed to the teachers involved on the course and the directors of studies.

The program advisory boards reports upwards to the educational board who in turn reports to the faculty board.