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<p>Hej all,</p>
<p>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 <b>next
Wednesday, the 3rd of April</b>.<br>
</p>
<p>Problems:</p>
<ol>
<li>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)</li>
<ul>
<li>This leads to avoidable complications with many people
asking for zoom options.</li>
<li>This also extends to the regularity at which each of the
topics is offered.</li>
</ul>
<li>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.</li>
<li>Unclear intentions for the post-meeting. Recently a
professor started the meeting with "so what do we do in these
post-meetings?"</li>
</ol>
<p>Ideas to address these points:</p>
<ul>
<li>To address 1.: </li>
<ul>
<li>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.<br>
</li>
<li>If there are no talks in that time frame, choose a fitting
one from the Albanova colloquia video archive.</li>
<li>If no professor wants to supervise the colloquia in a given
week: let an advanced PhD student do it.<br>
</li>
<ul>
<li>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.</li>
</ul>
<li>Fix a target number of each topics per year or per semester.
For example, "three colloquia of each topic per year".</li>
</ul>
<li>To address 2.:</li>
<ul>
<li>At the very least both meetings and all deadlines should be
fixed before the colloquium.<br>
</li>
<li>We could even standardise the times for the
pre-/post-meetings, and arrange our schedules around that.<br>
</li>
<li>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.</li>
</ul>
<li>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?</li>
<ul>
<li>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.<br>
</li>
</ul>
</ul>
<p>One overarching point I see is that we think there could be more
responsibility on the PhD students to make this course flow
better.</p>
<p>I look forward to hearing your thoughts.<br>
</p>
All the best and a happy Easter break to you,<br>
Lukas<br>
<p></p>
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