OWLS and other “creatures”

Our department contributes a lot within education; Mostly for medicine but also significant contributions of teaching in studies of pharmacy, nutrition, dentistry and also non-medical subjects at the other faculties.

It is difficult to have a proper overview regarding who is responsible for what related to teaching within our departmental structure based mainly on research groups, not the traditional medical specialities/subjects.

The head of our department has therefore set up a working group in which we will try to find a sensible structure to secure a good overview of who is responsible for what regarding our educational responsibilities. Who holds the overview of which teaching resources are available? When a teacher becomes ill; where are persons with the right skills to step in? And when applying for a leave of absence: who should be consulted to know whether the educational responsibilities might be undertaken by other?

IGS (Department of Global Public Health and Primary Care) has an administrative structure of their education recourses in parallel with their research-group structure, where they have teaching/educational group leaders named UGLE (English: OWL) that should hold this overview regarding teaching resources (teachers!) and their responsibility to undertake defined teaching tasks. We are now working to develop our teaching structure and perhaps define corresponding OWL territories within K2. Each OWL-nest will probably be connected to a research groups, but some of the OWL-nestlings will have to fly a little outside their local territories to perform their teaching associated with other subject areas.

Each OWL must keep an overview of their respective OWL-chicks while the HEAD of OWLS  (Teaching Director of K2 = signed) supervises the OWLS’ management of their territories.

We need to map K2s total educational contributions to know what is affiliated with each of our research group today (the “terrain”) and how our education map should be made to fit properly in the future!

If you have opinions regarding this process, we are very interested in input; which teaching resources belong together in one “nest”? How to ensure good coverage of all education within our responsibility? Please give feedback to the K2 teaching director!

The department management is really trying to secure teaching resources when announcing vacancies! But we need to know what the former position has contained regarding teaching, and who may this teaching be transferred to if other teaching is to be secured by affiliating this position to another subject/field.

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