[Drand] Improving the Colloquium Course

[Lukas König]

Hej all,

me and some people I talked to see some problems with the structure of 
the colloquium course. I have an initial collection of these, plus a 
first set of ideas what could be changed, and will talk to Bo about 
these at some point. Anything that he cannot change by himself, I plan 
to take up with KUF. Since the initial discussion does not include all 
of us, I wanted to collect your opinions: Do you see other problems that 
we have missed? Do you have other ideas for solutions? Do you disagree 
and think the course should stay as it is? Let me know in a reply here, 
by *next Wednesday, the 3rd of April*.

Problems:

 1. Too few colloquia overall, in particular not sufficiently regular.
    This is definitely the biggest issue. (more than once, I have missed
    a series of multiple colloquia while travelling for a few weeks, and
    then came back to Stockholm and no colloquia were offered for a long
    time)
      * This leads to avoidable complications with many people asking
        for zoom options.
      * This also extends to the regularity at which each of the topics
        is offered.
 2. Regularity of pre-meetings and post-meetings: There usually are two
    doodles per colloquium. Sometimes at the time of the colloquium, the
    post-meeting date is not fixed yet.
 3. Unclear intentions for the post-meeting. Recently a professor
    started the meeting with "so what do we do in these post-meetings?"

Ideas to address these points:

  * To address 1.:
      o Fix a lower bound to the frequency of colloquia. For example
        "one colloquium every two weeks" seemed reasonable. This also
        solves the zoom questions, because missing a colloquium is no
        longer a big problem.
      o If there are no talks in that time frame, choose a fitting one
        from the Albanova colloquia video archive.
      o If no professor wants to supervise the colloquia in a given
        week: let an advanced PhD student do it.
          + Here we could even ask Christophe if the department could
            give them some teaching hours, but honestly I think we would
            also do it without that.
      o Fix a target number of each topics per year or per semester. For
        example, "three colloquia of each topic per year".
  * To address 2.:
      o At the very least both meetings and all deadlines should be
        fixed before the colloquium.
      o We could even standardise the times for the pre-/post-meetings,
        and arrange our schedules around that.
      o If this is hard to do because of teaching obligations etc., one
        could fix it as a lunch seminar. The meetings are usually quite
        informal, so eating while discussing a topic should be feasible.
  * For point 3. we have no clear solutions. Perhaps the professors just
    need a nudge to think about what to do in post-meetings in advance?
      o Related: Some of the professors have a hard time using Athena.
        There should be a document to help them, or an annual meeting
        for this, like the teaching meeting for us PhD students.

One overarching point I see is that we think there could be more 
responsibility on the PhD students to make this course flow better.

I look forward to hearing your thoughts.

All the best and a happy Easter break to you,
Lukas
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