“We have a great foundation”

What would you like to highlight from the past year?

This year, I’ve focused a lot on both the national and international accreditation work. In both processes, I could feel the great drive and commitment of everyone involved - and a pride in our school and our degree programmes. This was a great experience.

I’m also thrilled that all accreditation institutions emphasised that we have a fantastic quality assurance culture at Aarhus BSS in relation to our degree programmes. We have talented lecturers, competent administrative support staff, happy students - in short, we have the best possible foundation for creating great degree programmes. You can always work on improving a quality assurance system, but developing a culture is quite another matter.

I’m also pleased that this year we’ve made good progress in terms of evaluating our degree programme portfolio across the school. It’s important that we get an overall view of our degree programmes so that we can enhance the profiles of the individual degree programmes. I look forward to continuing this work next year.

What are you looking forward to in 2018?

I very much look forward to completing the Danish institutional accreditation process. We need to get this done, and we have the quality and mindset to do it.

We also need to use Educational IT in a more systematic manner. Many of our lecturers are already off to a good start and have tested a lot of different tools. However, to better consolidate the use of EDU IT, it’s important that we work together to find out what works and what doesn’t. This process takes time, but also has the potential to greatly improve the students’ learning. 

We also need to continue the ongoing work of ensuring that our graduates are well-prepared for their future working lives. We’ll do this by e.g. creating well-defined degree programme profiles, but also by making sure that the students collaborate with the business community during their studies as much as possible.

Today, many students write their Master’s thesis in collaboration with a company, and many participate in project-oriented courses where they learn to apply their knowledge. In this way, we’re able to combine academic theory with practice. Most of our degree programmes now also offer a supplementary course in career management skills, which aims to make the students more aware of their own competences. I hope that eventually we’ll  be able to offer the course on all of our degree programmes.

Do you have any final words for the employees?

I’d like to wish everyone a very happy Christmas and thank you all for the past year. Next year, I look forward to continuing our mutual work of making Aarhus BSS’ degree programmes even better - of making all of our good things interact with the new things that are coming in a way that makes sense. Both academically and in terms of our students’ learning and education.