A forwarded email, with a couple of specific comments removed (as requested by the sender).
"Yes, more feedback is required. Other departments have different ways of collecting feedback. Some collect feedback during lectures(they provide 15 min from the lecture for students to write feedback and everyone should give feedback before they are allowed to leave). After that during the next lecture there can be a discussion based on the given feedback. English department is going to include course feedback to Weboodi so that students would not get their grades before they have given feedback. This would stay anonymous even though it?s written in Weboodi. But if this would be carried out in our department if should be announced clearly that the feedback stays anonymous!! So students would get depressed or something.. :D
About Microbiology course. Can we cooperate with Medical campus with this course? They obviously have a microbiology course and maybe it would be more of our level than the one with Process Engineering?? I found the opinto-opas of Medicine and they have a Microbiology course in their second year (spring). The course is 9.5 op which is quite large. But if they have lectures + lab course we could only do their lecture part and have our own lab course.. What is said in course description (quite harsh translation): Microbiology and immonology. Basic information about microbes causing diseases, their characteristics, methods how to study them and the immunological mechanisms in our body. Bacteriology, virology, mycology, parasitology(?) and immunology. There are some lab work and demostrations and some seminars. There course is held in Finnish. So this could be one option?
My opinion is that there should be at least some flexibility in third year to do some extra courses. Also about the English language, it?s ok and improves your skills when more courses are held in English. But when there is a Finnish teacher speaking in English it should be emphasized that there are exchange students or the reason why it is held in English. I think last year some people commented on Biomolecules (Tuomo?s part) but I think that only some of the people new that there were exchange students taking the course.
During this year there has been at least two sessions where real biochemists have told about their careers(research, other fields). I think it really has giving us new perspective on what we can do in the future. But of course everyone will not participate.. There has also been similar sessions during firs year tutorial sessions. Maybe more could be involved in these tutorial sessions (pienryhmäohjaus) because 10 sessions are compulsory to first year students.
Well, here something..
Best regards, Tuija"
A lot of excellent suggestions.
My comments to add would be that however we collect it feedback must be annonymous and that the problems with organising a course jointly with the medical campus are connected with timetabling and transport. Perhaps if Jari could find out how the medical campus course is organised and we can investigate. Still in an ideal world we would have the microbiology teaching in house.