Dear all K2 employees; THANK YOU for your invaluable efforts in teaching at our department!

Each of you contribute direct or indirect to the teaching provided. As with all other work, the corona epidemic also had a significant impact on how we could conduct educational activities. Under these circumstances, all staff have shown a great deal of flexibility: despite physically closed campus, our students have been nurtured and provided education, but using other modalities and through other channels.

Lectures have been moved from auditoriums to the web, been recorded through Kaltura or sound tracks on PowerPoint files and posted at MittUiB, group sessions or lectures are held via Zoom or Skype. And even though the hospital closed down a great deal of patient care, students who needed practice to obtain a temporary license have completed and been approved the revised minimum service. This provide Norway more people who can function as doctors from summer and onwards (leaving us better equipped for a possible new corona wave).

Thanks also to the hospitals in our region (Haukeland, Haraldsplass, Stavanger, Førde and Haugesund) that have helped students to actually complete their practice. We have been far more fortunate than in Oslo, where hospital closed the doors for students in clinical practice.

The faculty has established a group of super-users in digital teaching, Bergithe Eikeland Oftedal is K2’s representative. She shall not act as IT technician or conduct individual training but can advise on what programs/equipment and what is appropriate to use.

Finally: Thanks and goodbye from me! I have been acting as teaching director for K2 since I was hired as professor in the fall of 2015, ie. I started at the same time as the “new” curriculum for medicine. It has been exciting to follow the implementation (both of the curriculum and my professional academic function), participate in the inner life of the department management and to truly ensure that teaching is as high on the agenda as it deserves! I am not quitting teaching but I am transferring the formal responsibility as leader of teaching  to my successor Mette Vesterhus. Welcome Mette, you will receive proper presentation in a later K2-news.