Learning Culture

Building a scholarly and collegial teacher culture inspired by the research culture - a learning culture.

Academia is characterized by two strong cultures: the teaching culture and the research culture. Despite being contained in the same individuals, these cultures are remarkably different: the research culture is characterized by continuous scientific and methodological development, documentation, collaboration, sharing, and innovation, but also by scientific discussion, debate, critique and peer-review. The teaching culture is more individually-based, focusing on personal experience and perceived ‘talent’ rather than on adoption and development of documented methods and practices. There are fewer opportunities for sharing and little collegial collaboration and support; documentation is scarce and there is a tendency to conserve traditional teaching methods. Many strengths of the research culture can be adopted in the teaching culture, which would benefit from becoming more hypothesis-driven, evidence-based, and peer-reviewed. This is a key feature of the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) movement. By making use of the research culture, faculty have the necessary tools to not only become better teachers individually, but also to become active and supportive members of a teaching and learning community, with shared responsibility and a common language for discussing and sharing knowledge and experience.

At the core of bioCEED’s work is the realization that education, and development of educational quality, is a collegial responsibility and a collaborative activity. Furthermore, students and teachers are not the only ‘players’ in the educational ‘game’; technical and administrative staff, course assistants, educational developers, and the departmental and institutional leadership make up the partnership that together shape the content and quality of our courses and programs.

bioCEED works to promote a scholarly and collegial (SoTL) teacher culture by explaining and motivating the need for a cultural shift, and the benefits for education, educational quality, and individual teachers and students. We create arenas where different stakeholders, and especially the teaching staff, collaboratively can develop their pedagogical knowledge and skills, and share and discuss teaching and learning.

bioCEED stimulate and guide the development of strong educational leadership that recognizes and explicitly values effective teaching practices and high-impact contributions to the learning culture. We work to strengthen the evidence-base, identify success factors, and promote development of mechanisms locally and across the HigherEd sector in Norway and internationally.

UNIS Learning Forum

UNIS Learning Forum is an arena for exchange of experiences and opinions on teaching and learning - facilitating and motivating change and development. Recurrent topics include strategy planning for UNIS, bioCEED, field teaching and teaching challenges at UNIS with elaboration on combined master and PhD courses, peer evaluation and active learning, and student workload.