Catching the white whale

 

My university, The Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences (SLU) has grand ambitions for the future! 

SLU aim to double the number of students in the next upcoming years. If you knew that the number of students is only about 3900 you might be more impressed… or appalled. This number is very small compared to our elderly Swedish siblings Lund University and Uppsala University which has 40 000 registered students each. The total number of registered students at Swedish universities are normally around 400 000 so snitching 4000 of these to SLU should be theoretically possible at least. It is just an additional tiny 1 % of the grand total.  

The edge of SLU is that it holds some (to Sweden) unique educational programs such as the veterinary training, agronomists and land scape architects which attracts many students (but not enough). SLU is a small University scattered across several minor and major campuses in Sweden so the students are dispersed over many locations. Almost all of the locations are outside a city in a more rural area. So how do you get more students in? 

You go online of course!

One of the most popular courses in SLU is a relatively new course that is accessible to everyone having completed upper secondary school and it is given as a distance course with online meetings and remote activities. The course was about houseplants (yes, the kind of plants you keep in your windowsill!) and had over 20 applicants per available spot! The recipe for more students appears to be to aim for subjects that are of interest to a broad audience (everyone has a houseplant…) and go online to give many access to the university and the knowledge (not everyone wants to live in the dark and cold wilderness of north Sweden…). The ONL course has helped me to see the endless possibilities there are in online learning and has given me plenty of inspiration for future teaching and learning. It is so much more than digital lectures, sitting passively staring into a powerpoint presentation on a screen. Even though all types of learning activities cannot be performed in an online setting, the ongoing pandemic has forced the broadening of views when it comes to this. Indeed, necessity is the mother of invention, also when it comes to developing how we teach. I foresee that an increasing part of the future education at SLU and other universities will be taking place in cyberspace. That is where we will catch that while whale of 4000 students.

Don't chase whales -become the whale! 

https://www.slu.se/en/education/programmes-courses/courses/