By continuously focusing on our visibility, an excellent study environment and showcasing our positive impact on society we hope to convince more Danish high school students to choose an education at our department.
Together with AU’s international office, we will expand our international recruitment based on our attractive programs, including a growing set of Master’s specializations. An important aspect of international recruitment is to retain our high subject rankings on the mainstream ranking lists.
We will continue to develop our recruitment campaigns, making sure the students make a well-informed choice and have their expectations aligned with the reality of being a student at the department, ie. the content of our programmes, the workload etc.
To expand the talent pool, we will continue and expand targeted campaigns for female students, including events like IT Camp for Girls.
We will expand collaboration with high schools, including research staff giving talks. And continue to develop our “visit service” where high school classes can visit the department and get an introduction to the content of our programs and the life as a student in our department.
We will also continue to develop more public talks that can be given as part of the OFN programme at Aarhus University, at the Open University, high schools etc.
One important measure of securing retention is to attract students with higher GPAs from high schools. This requires that our programs become still more visible as attractive educations that open doors to having a strong impact on society including green transition, better health care, better education, more ethical development of technology etc.
The department recognizes a challenge regarding student culture and the students’ sense of belonging to the department. Traditionally, many CS students have part-time jobs where they spend many hours per week which means they are only on campus when they have classes. In addition, we also suspect that the Covid pandemic has had a lasting impact. Hence, it is important to continue our efforts to maintain and improve our study environment, and it is equally important to continually involve student organizations and representatives in the work.
The department will continue to ensure that all classes for CS students take place in the department facilities and give high priority to continuous development of the surrounding student facilities, including the student labs, to make it attractive for the students to become a daily part of the department culture. In particular, we will increase the engagement of our many teaching assistants to help foster a culture with more presence at the university to develop fruitful learning and academic discourse.
We also wish to increase the direct interaction of students with researchers, which means that more faculty resources must be allocated to courses, teaching and supervision activities, perhaps at the cost of less traditional lecturing.
A key dimension of increasing enrollment numbers will be to increase the intake of students with an international background.
We already have a scheme in place for recruiting and enrolling highly qualified international students to our master’s programmes and will continue our efforts to improve the “success rate” by targeted communication, recruitment campaigns etc.
Starting in 2025, we will open for enrollment to English language versions of our two bachelor’s programmes in Computer Science and IT Product Development, respectively. We hope to gradually increase the intake of international students at the bachelor’s level to a total of 250 by 2030, if government allows us to grow the number to that level.
In addition, we will introduce industry part-time versions of our master’s programs. This will offer a more flexible student life which we hope to be attractive for international students as it will allow students to work more hours alongside their studies. The programs will, of course, also be available for Danish students.
We wish to provide more targeted or tailored courses in computer science to the rest of the university, such as minors to the rest of NAT, or one of the new 75 ECTS Master’s programme for non-IT bachelors from the entire university, this could be based on a course structure like the Harvard CS50 designed and offered to the entire university.
We will also develop and run a campaign to encourage more students in other programs at Aarhus University and other Danish universities, to take their minor in computer science.
We also have a vision to develop computer science for all (CS4ALL) modules that introduce computer science into other fields, for example physics, biology, social science, economics. These modules should be tailored to the specific field and hence needs to be developed in collaboration with researchers/teachers from the relevant educational fields.
Contribute to the continuing education of teachers. We offer the Master’s in Informatics Teaching (MIU) to high school teachers, and we will continue promoting and developing it. But we will also utilize the network of high school teachers growing from MIU to develop a closer and more research related collaboration with the high schools to constantly improve our supply chain of students.
We will radically expand the activities of Centre for Computational Thinking and Design (CCTD) to the new topic of Digital Technology Comprehension in public schools. This will take place through the knowledge center for Digital Tech Comprehension, where research and collaborative activities are concentrated around the elementary school level.
