Iris Borch
PhD Candidate
The Arctic University of Norway
Dates: August 2017 – July 2018
Purpose of Visit
During her visit CHES she will be meeting with individual members of the CHES community, and hopes to learn from evaluation practices at UBC, through collaboration with staff at the Evaluation Unit at UBC.
Iris plans to take courses in evaluation at UBC and/or an evaluation course offered by the Canadian Evaluation Society (Norwegian higher education institutions don’t offer any Master’s or PhD programs in evaluation).
Biography
Iris Borch is currently employed as a PhD candidate at Centre for Teaching, Learning and Technology, University of Tromsø (UiT), The Arctic University of Norway and will come to CHES as part of her PhD training.
She completed her Physiotherapy education (1998) and a Master’s in Health Science (2011) in Tromsø, Norway. She was working as a physiotherapist and student supervisor at the University hospital in Tromsø for many years before she started to work in academia. From 2012-2016 she was Program Director of the Physiotherapy program at UiT.
The topic of her PhD project is student evaluation of Medical and Health Education programs. The PhD project is investigating how today’s evaluation practices influence the quality of study programs and how evaluation is followed up within the organization. To answer these research questions she is using several qualitative methods including: document analysis of evaluation reports, focus group discussions with student representatives and interviews of leaders/faculty members. Eight educational programs are included in the project: Bioengineering, Nursing, Medicine, Midwifery, Odontology, Pharmacy, Physiotherapy and Psychology.