Earlier this year, I wrote about my 23 tips to improve your web presence. Those tips were meant to encourage academics to care about how their employee web pages look at universities. Such pages look different from university to university. Still, in most places, they contain an image and some standard information on the top, followed by more or less structured information further down. For reference, this is an explanation of how my employee page is built up:

We have been running our free online course Music Moves a couple of times on the FutureLearn platform. The course consists of a number of videos, as well as articles, quizzes, etc., all of which help create a great learning experience for the people that take part. One great thing about the FutureLearn model (similar to Coursera, etc.) is that they focus on creating a complete course. There are many benefits to such a model, not least to create a virtual student group that interact in a somewhat similar way to campus students.

As Head of the Department of Musicology for the last four years, I have been acquainted with the inner workings of the University of Oslo (UiO). Before, I mainly looked at the university from the perspective of a researcher and educator. Now I have been involved in issues at all three “levels”: department, faculty, and central. I have also collaborated a lot more with all parts of the administration: studies, research, IT, economy, communication, archive, and HR.

I often overhear students that talk about doing “school work” and going to “school”. So to all students out there: you are students at a university, not pupils at a school. That is also why we talk about assignments, not homework, and lectures, not classes. You go to school because you have to, you go to university because you want to.