Report summary
Based on the written documentation and the informed interviews the group of experts finds
that the Department of Landscape Architecture at the Biotechnical faculty has a wellfunctioning quality culture grounded in their small size and open-door policy. The
department provides a study environment where teachers and students feel that they are
close and can easily get in a dialogue with each other to influence the mode of teaching,
day by day. It is a joint impression by both students, teachers and management that it is
easy to develop/change the study conditions for the better, through student evaluations
and direct oral feedback.
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The study at the Landscape Architecture department is split in the BSc and MSc level,
emphasizing on design and planning, respectively. The group of experts finds the last
year’s improved self-evaluation reports to be useful documents to keep track of the
evaluation feedback, needs, improvements and actions, but the reports from the previous
several years were too similar from year to year and from level to level to function as a
real monitoring and development tool. However, it seems that the size and close dialogue
have provided a well-functioning study environment that has detected and acted on the
shortcomings and improvement along the way, despite a poor self-evaluation process.
Even though the latest self-evaluation reports have significantly improved, there is still a
lot of space for improvement and the group of experts hopes, that the suggestions given
in this report will be of some help.
The management expressed how they consider the self-evaluation report of a study
program as an internal short-term plan and they operate with a separate action plan made
at the faculty level, informed by the work of the self-evaluation plans on the department
level. This shows how there is also a dialogue from the department level upwards, but the
group of experts considers that students should be more involved both in the assessment
and decision process in the work with the self-evaluation report on the department level
and that the implications and action plans should be better communicated back to both
students and teachers.
In recent years, the department has made some revisions in the study plan (inclusions of
new elective courses) amongst other things to strengthen the collaboration with external
stakeholders. The group of experts heard from both students and teachers as well as
employers that students have acquired updated skills, are fluent in graphic languages and
knowledgeable on topics like sustainability and mobility. The group of experts sympathizes
with their expressed interest in engaging practicing landscape architects as studio-teachers
to better link education with practice, similar to how the Architecture Faculty is allowed to.
This could further strengthen the relevance of education and enable detecting urgencies in
close collaboration with the profession.