Course leadership at the doctoral level
The Course Leader has the overall responsibility for ensuring that the course is of high quality and is possible to carry out with the available resources.
The main objective of medical education at the doctoral level is to train researchers who can advance the development of medicine and health, partly through their own new discoveries and partly through critical examination and introduction of new experiences and methods within the field of healthcare.
The Course Leader’s responsibilities
The Course Leader is appointed by the Research Studies Board (Forskarutbildningsnämnden, FUN) and their basic requirement is the competency needed for to lead the course, as assessed by the board.
The Course Leader is expected to:
- in cooperation with a course preparation group, compose new syllabuses to be established by the Research Studies Board. The syllabus is first written in Swedish and, after it is established, translated into English.
- organise and plan the course, such as setting the schedule, booking lecturers, venues and refreshments
- ensure that each student in the course is given an equal opportunity to achieve the course objectives.
- ensure that the teaching is conducted according to the pedagogical principles described in the course syllabus or established by the Research Studies Board.
- administrate the course content in the learning platform Canvas.
- conduct a course evaluation according to the template for the doctoral programme, and publish the results on the course site.
- write a course report once a year with reflections on the course content and opportunities for development, as well as statistics on the number of applicants, reserves and dropouts and an account of the results of the course evaluations.
- ensure that course material is archived according to current guidelines.
- notify the Research Studies Coordinator of the results of the examination no later than ten days after the end of each course cycle.
Examination and registration of credits
The Research Studies Board appoints examiners for doctoral courses at the Faculty of Medicine. A person employed as a teacher at Lund University who has a doctoral degree or equivalent scientific competency, may be appointed as an examiner for a PhD-level course. For those educational components where an examiner has not been appointed, the principal supervisor is the examiner.
The examiner for each doctoral course is responsible for reporting results to the Research Studies Coordinator, who registers the results in Ladok.
Course evaluations and course reports
The Research Studies Board has decided on a common template for course evaluations of the compulsory doctoral courses, as well as the elective courses financed by the board. Course evaluations are used to ensure continuous improvement of the courses. The work with course evaluations is published via link from each course’s site. The results are followed up and reported to the board.
In addition to course evaluations, a course report is made annually for each course according to a template from the board. The course report includes the Course Leader's reflections on the content of the course and opportunities for development, as well as statistics on the number of applicants, reserves and students who have dropped out.