Staff Training Courses

On 3-4 February 2016 the Göttingen University hosted a series of workshops about research data management and institutional repositories.

Research data take on greater significance in today's scholarly communication, which is in part attributable to the growing fraction and amounts of digital data, new digital tools, and the requirements on replicability of scientific results. These developments pose new challenges on the research process, as well as on institutional organizational structures and roles.

Because of the massification of higher education and the growing number of students and young research staff obtaining a PhD and postdoc, there is an increasing need to offer good and structural career support, that prepares and equips students and young researchers to take their career into their own hands and to successfully enter the labour market.

Career support varies between institutions and countries. Learning from each other within the U4 partnership, a new staff training will be launched: 'Professionalization of Career Services in a Global Context'. The programme is a 2 year cycle (2016-2017) consisting of 4 workshops (organized at each university) with intermediary (distant) supervision among the participants. A first session takes place in Uppsala on 3 and 4 March 2016 with a focus on skills and competences for career coaches.

In December 2015, the second workshop of the 'Marketing and Recruitment' working group of the U4 network took place in Uppsala.

The main focus of this meeting was on communication with prospective students. The group brought together those who deal with marketing of the respective universities and those who handle the fruits of their work - student inquiries - on a daily basis. Different perspectives of these two groups on what constitutes communication and what the goals of communication with students are made the discussion very enriching for all the participants.

Marketing vs. expectation management, reactive vs. proactive communication during different phases of the application process, efficient use of online communication channels, best-practices for dealing with inquiries, and availability are just some of the topics that were discussed during the meeting.

In December 2015 the University of Göttingen hosted 12 supervisors and co-supervisors during the U4 Workshop 'Supervising International Doctoral Candidates'. The workshop was jointly organized by the teams of Teaching and Learning in Higher Education and Göttingen International.

After a warm welcome by Professor Hiltraud Casper-Hehne, Vice-President of International Affairs at University of Göttingen, and Lisa Korn, coordinator of the team of Teaching and Learning in Higher Education, the participants from Groningen, Uppsala and Göttingen started to exchange ideas, perspectives and experiences about the supervision of international doctoral candidates.

During 7-8 May the first session of the second Workshop Cycle on International Perspectives in Teaching and Learning took place in Uppsala.

Under the facilitation of educational developers Geir Gunnlaugsson (Uppsala University) and Angelika Thielsch (University of Göttingen) 16 participants from the U4 partners worked together with the aim of improving their daily work with internationalization and international students and staff

More info: IPT&L