Professor Karl Otto Ellefsen, Rector
This school year has been a soul-searching year for AHO. In this yearbook we
celebrate the variation, creativity and craft in the work accomplished by students
and teachers. However, in vein of critical scrutiny characteristic of an academic
institution like ours, two major evaluations of our Master programs have run
parallel to our everyday work in education and research.
The Oslo School of Architecture and Design has designated 2013 and 2014 as
“years of education”. Over the last decade huge effort has been laid down into
building AHO’s research environment, and the results have been good. This
is evident in the quality of our PhD program, and the number of “publishing
points” we accumulate each year through research publications, which goes to
show the extent of AHO’s accredited research activities. This is also manifest in
the setup of academic and administrative resources to accommodate research,
and most importantly in the shift in the Institutes’ attitude and approach to
research. Still, AHO is primarily a place to learn the disciplines. Whether or not
this is done with excellence or just to satisfaction is always open to discussion.
AHO’s approach to answering these pertinent questions is through bench-mark-
ing and comparisons with other institutions. In this way we get useful opera-
tional factors for the improvement of education and curriculum.
Teachers and students’ thoughts on educational quality are also gathered
through systematic questioning every semester. Their answers are analyzed
and discussed.
NOKUT, the Norwegian Agency for Quality Assurance in Education – a pro-
fessionally independent government agency that contributes towards quality
assurance and enhancement in higher education – has evaluated and approved
AHO’s quality system for education twice. These quality assessment systems
work primarily in an incremental way, giving grounds for individual measures
and improvement. Study plans are changed, courses and teachers are challenged
and budgets are used in a conscious manner to accomplish specific results. Even
so, sometimes a thorough “spring clean-up operation” is necessary, where all
structures are held up for critical inspection.
In this first “year of education” AHO has conducted socalled “academic eval-
uations” with the help of highly professional and critical international com-
mittees. The evaluations encompassed AHO’s most comprehensive Master
Evaluations
