AU is constantly working to optimise the encounter between lecturer, student and course content, as this is the key to both teaching quality and degree programme quality. In-depth knowledge is premised e.g. on the recruitment of outstanding research and teaching staff, combined with a supportive environment for learning and study, with continuous development of pedagogics and didactics. The work involves ensuring the academic level of lecturers, ensuring alignment between research and teaching, and creating a close connection between students and teaching staff as well as research.
Appointment of research and teaching staff as well as allocation of teaching resources are anchored at faculty/department/school level and take place according to local frameworks and guidelines in addition to AU's common norms for the appointment of permanent members of academic staff and teaching portfolio principles. AU also uses external teaching staff (fixed-term academic staff) to link research with current practice in both the private and public sectors. To ensure that the involvement of external teaching staff contributes positively to the quality and relevance of individual degree programmes and to student learning, both common and faculty-specific principles are followed. Planning teaching resources and organisation of teaching are in close collaboration with the degree programme management to ensure a relevant academic foundation for the programmes.
AU continuously works with different forms of research-integrated teaching that include students in research projects and strengthen students' own competencies, the disciplinary excellence of degree programmes, and students' ability to participate in research collaboration and in research environments. This work is usually at local and faculty level.
Quality assurance processes at AU apply various elements to ensure the knowledge base and the research base of degree programmes. Alignment between the academic elements of degree programmes and the lecturers' affiliation with relevant academic environments are monitored via staffing plans. For vocational and professional degree programmes as well as development-based degree programmes, the knowledge base is also monitored through an overview of the academic environments’ overall activities that are relevant to the knowledge base of the degree programmes (practical and development knowledge as well as research). For professional Master's degree programmes, a permanent academic staff (VIP)/fixed-term academic staff (DVIP) indicator is also used to ensure balance between VIP and DVIP. In connection with degree programme evaluations, the head of department/school draws up an overall report on the connection between research and teaching topics, reflections on the VIP indicator, and changes in the staff group.
To ensure that students have contact with current research, AU has established a university-wide norm for teaching hours as well as an indicator for the proportion of the minimum number of hours covered by permanent members of academic staff which shows how much of the teaching is performed by permanent academic staff.
The students' assessment of the teaching and the academic environment is important input to overall quality assurance work and is collected in ongoing course evaluations and in the Danish Student Survey.
