iEarth is an innovation project, and we, therefore, need to continuously revise our strategies to reach our long-term vision and goals. Below is a summary of our main activities in 2022:

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Student organisations are up and running, and we have hired a national leader in a 20% position to ensure that the organisations have continuity. Their contribution to iEarth is fundamental for our success as an SFU.

Several new courses are transformed to module based with student-active learning methods. The goal is that some of these also should be national courses offered in the consortium after the outline of the geohazard course running for the third time this year. iEarth consortium has been involved in more than 15-course re-design projects since the start of the SFU.

We are working on integrating the SDG goals into our curriculum and have had workshops on this topic at all institutions.

Students are active partners in our teaching development, and the new normal is to have course representatives in courses. This is the first step in establishing a culture for co-creation within the iEarth consortium.

We see an increased interest among the teachers to do SoTL projects on their own teaching. This will be followed up by shared workshops on teaching portfolios in 2023.

We got funding from a new HK-dir project led by Iver Martens titled “GeoIntern International”. This is an expansion of the internship course to other countries.

The joint bioCEED and iEarth course Leading Educational Change through SoTL course was concluded in 2022. 19 participants from 4 institutions (UiB, UiT, UNIS, UiO) completed the course (5 ECTS). The participants completed 7 group projects.

We arranged the fifth national GeoLearning Forum with 120 participants. The topic for this year’s event was “Sharing is caring”, emphasising co-creation, workshops, and a keynote on self-reflective learning.

We have changed our seed project program and increased the maximum grant amount, and we no longer have a fixed deadline for applying. This is done to make the program more adaptable and allows already funded projects to apply for follow-up money.

Our new web page is up and running and is an important tool for disseminating our activities.

The iEarth Research Group on educational research is now in a phase where we see publications from their work. This is very important dissemination for the international communities in educational research. We will strengthen the research group with two more experts, one in educational research and one in academic development.

Finally, we see augmented dialogue over teaching among our colleagues. Open dialogue is the first step towards a culture of sharing and educational development. We can’t point at a certain point in our effort that led to this, but we see that teachers have more knowledge about education research and that they more commonly use a language backed by literature.

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Funded seed projects in 2022

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You can read the full report here