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NTNU – THE FACULTY OF ARCHITECTURE AND FINE ART
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and measures to lift collaboration from the personal to the
structural level? What plans for Continuing Professional
Development (CPD) might be put into place, and who will
lead and deliver them? More particularly are the models of
creativity, School direction etc which have been presented to
the Committee during previous visits intended to be commu-
nicated widely across all staff? How will the vision be shared
with other important constituencies?
Staffing
A discernible potential risk lies in the current pattern of
staffing. There appears to be a shortage of tenured staff
which may explain effects such as there being only one pro-
fessor available (or wishing) to teach at Bachelor Level. Staff
at Bachelor Level do not appear to be particularly well cared
for, with unintended consequences that some are exhausted
after a few years. This then gives rise to a major risk of being
unable to ensure knowledge continuity. The current
modus
operandi
appears to be very people-dependent (ie knowl-
edge contained within people’s heads) and insufficiently
system-dependent (with knowledge documented, transpar-
ent and accessible).
Quality enhancement
It is not easy to discern, again from an external vantage
point, how quality is assured and, going forward, enhanced.
What formal measures are in place to support these pro-
cesses and where are they documented? For example how
does the School monitor student progress, and follow up on
students’ employability destinations? How (and why) are new
courses developed and what is the process of their approval?
Is there (should there be) a Board of Masters Education?
How are the best students attracted and selected, other than
by mere grade attainment and the popularity of Trondheim
as a town with an attractive student lifestyle? Is it, for ex-
ample, optimal to give students admission from grades only,
or should there be an entrance examination? In short, how
does the School make sure that it is recruiting the right kind
of student, and how has it defined ’right’?
As a matter of both quality assurance and quality enhance-
ment, how does the School evaluate its provision? How
does it evaluate what works? What sources of feedback are
available and utilised, eg How is feedback obtained from
students? How content are the architectural offices with
NTNU graduates, and what is the subsequent quality of the
structures designed and built NTNU architects? How does
the School determine that it is educating the rightkind of
architects, and what measures of social impact are taken
into account in this consideration? What is the quality of
an NTNU Diploma, and how is this warranted? Is there for
example an Exhibition Yearbook, displaying the School’s body
of work and rendering it publicly accessible? What opportu-
nities realistically exist for improving the physical teaching
environment and its available equipment?
Vulnerability of courses and potential contexts of en-
hancement
Courses under present arrangements appear to be highly
dependent on particular members of staff and their inherent
expertise. This presents an obvious risk for ‘future-proof-
ing’ provision. The presentation of courses and the process
of student selection by a kind of ‘public hustings’ approach
would seem to be less than desirable. Although there are
clear benefits for courses meeting students’ interests, an
entirely consumer-driven programme would seem to render
the programme’s minimum requirements less important.
This raises a set of interesting choices for the leadership in
terms of how it will seek to enhance quality in terms of 1) a
high fidelity mode (with the priority on consistency to a set
of principles and standards) , 2) a low fidelity mode (with
greater latitude allowed according to local contexts) ,3) a
consumerist approach (based on student satisfaction) or
4) a managerialist approach (where efficient resourcing is
key). We might represent these choices diagrammatically as
follows:
Organisation and Coordination
The scheduling of classes needs to be revisited to overcome
the possibility of the overlap between studios and courses.
The ‘marketing’ of courses, with teachers presenting the
courses and hoping for ‘votes’ involves unnecessary work for
teachers and some courses(perhaps important ones ) might
not be realised.
Eg NTNU Faculty of Architecure and Fine Art Employer Student