Systems and tools for education at KTH

1. Establish or modify a course

Establishing a new course at KTH involves developing a complete course proposal that meets the university’s requirements for quality, content, and implementation. The process includes formulating the course’s purpose, intended learning outcomes, content, examination format, and expected workload. The proposal is prepared and quality assured before being approved by the responsible Head of School.

Modifying an existing course follows a similar but simplified process. Here, the course coordinator may propose adjustments to, for example, the syllabus, learning outcomes, or examination. Any changes must be justified, anchored, and approved according to KTH’s decision-making procedure. Major changes are handled as the establishment of a new course.

Establish a course (in Swedish)

Modify a course (in Swedish) 

2. Schedule

Before a course begins, a scheduling request must be submitted. The request is created in the tool “Preferences,” although who is responsible for creating it varies between schools at KTH. For example, it may be the course coordinator or an administrator who submits the request. Deadlines for when the scheduling request must be completed can be found in the scheduling calendar.

Once the scheduling requests have been compiled, a preliminary schedule is created and sent out for review. If you are a course coordinator, programme director, or otherwise responsible for the schedule, you will have the opportunity to review the preliminary schedule during the review period. Dates for review periods are listed in the scheduling calendar. After the review period, a final schedule is published.

Schedule and room booking

Submit scheduling request

Calendar – Scheduling

3. About course and course memo

“About course” consists of a set of webpages for each course, published in the course and programme directory. Here you will find general course information that is open for everyone to access, such as course syllabi, information about course offerings, course memos, course analyses, and an archive page that collects all historical documentation.

As an examiner or course coordinator, you can edit certain information displayed on the “Before course selection” page. This includes the image, the short course description shown next to the image, as well as the text under the headings "Course disposition" and "Supplementary information". Examiners, course coordinators, and teachers can also create and publish course memos here. All edits are made through the administration tool “Manage About course.”

About course

The page Before course selection

Course memo

4. Course participants, Funka support, and individual study plans

In the Course Participants service, you can view information about admitted and registered students in a course. The service is used by teachers and examiners when planning courses. It displays students who are admitted and registered, along with information such as their course instance, programme, eligibility requirements, tuition fee status, and Funka code. The service is primarily intended for examiners to manage students who receive accessibility support.

If you are the principal supervisor for a doctoral student, you can create an individual study plan for them. This is done in the ISP system, which is a web-based system for managing doctoral students’ individual study plans.

Course Participants and Funka Support

ISP – Individual Study Plans

5. Prepare your Canvas course room

When a course offering is approved in Ladok, a corresponding course room is automatically created in Canvas, and the course coordinator, teachers, and examiner (as well as registered students) are automatically synced from Ladok. Before the course begins, the Canvas room must be prepared. This includes adding relevant course information, ensuring that modules, dates, and links are updated and accurate, and checking that the course room is logical and easy to navigate. Students will only gain access to the course room once it has been published.

Before the start of the course – checklist for Canvas

In the Canvas room, you must also publish course-specific information about generative AI for your course. To support teachers in creating this information, ready-made templates are available. These are automatically synced into Canvas for easy access and can be edited to suit your course.

KTH's templates for course-specific information on generative AI

1. Canvas

Canvas is KTH's Learning Management System and serves as the central hub for course information, communication, and digital learning activities. In Canvas, teachers publish materials, instructions, activities, and assessment tasks, while students submit their work, take quizzes, and receive feedback. The platform is also used for planning the course structure, managing groups, discussion forums, and reporting results. Canvas is therefore the primary digital environment for organizing, delivering, and supporting teaching and learning at KTH.

Canvas – KTH's Learning Management System

2. Digital systems and tools

There are many systems and tools available that KTH provides.

• Zoom  is a video conferencing service that enables digital meetings as part of your course design.
• Mentimeter  is a web-based presentation tool and digital system for interactive real-time polling. Participants can vote on different options or type in their own responses. As an employee or student at KTH, you can use it in presentations or teaching, both in the classroom and remotely via Zoom.
• KTH Play , also known as Kaltura, is KTH’s service for storing and sharing video and audio files. These files can easily be imported into Canvas or other web pages. KTH Play offers recording features, some editing tools, and automatic machine-generated captions.
• Möbius  is an external tool recommended when you want to create assignments where numerical calculations play an important role. Möbius allows you to evaluate answers that include numerical calculations, dynamically adjust the problem based on previous student responses, and provides greater options for randomizing variables and tasks compared to Canvas quizzes.
• Digital whiteboards  can be used to visualize and create walkthroughs both in teaching and in meetings. KTH provides several tools through licenses and agreements, such as Lucidspark.
• Unite! Metacampus  is the Unite! alliance’s digital platform that gives you access to courses, activities, and interactive workspaces offered by Unite! and the nine alliance universities.

1. Possibility to conduct examinations with lockdown in a computer room

KTH Digicertus Exam is KTH’s system for digital examinations in computer rooms with lockdown. This means that the computers in the room are locked so that students only have access to Canvas during the exam. When you as a teacher plan such an examination, you need to prepare the correct settings in Canvas — for example, restricting access to course materials outside the exam assignment itself, setting the start and end time, and ordering the lockdown of the computer room well in advance of the exam.

KTH Digicertus Exam

2. Plagiarism review with Inspera Originality

Inspera Originality is a tool for plagiarism review of submitted assignments and should be used by teachers and examiners when students submit text files in Canvas. Originality is primarily used through Canvas, but in exceptional cases it can also be used as a standalone tool.

Plagiarism review with Inspera Originality

3. Exam scanning and physical or digital assessment

After a written exam in a classroom, the exams are scanned, and students can then view their scanned exams on their results page in the personal menu. A student’s handwritten exam is scanned in two steps: first the submitted, ungraded exam, and then the graded version. If the exam is graded in Canvas, it is scanned only once.

Even if the exam was written on paper in a classroom, it is still possible to assess the exams digitally using SpeedGrader in Canvas. This can be advantageous, for example, to avoid handling large stacks of paper afterwards. In the examination course room, you can easily import students’ handwritten exams as submissions in a Canvas Assignment using the KTH Import Exams function.

Exam scanning (in Swedish)

KTH Import Exams

4. Reporting grades in Ladok

Grades can be reported to Ladok manually or using KTH Transfer to Ladok (T2L) - an application that allows you to transfer letter grades from Canvas directly into Ladok. T2L can be used from examination and course rooms that have reporting permissions in Ladok. The results must be published and in letter-grade format in order to be transferred. The transfer is made as a draft in Ladok, which you later confirm so that the grade becomes official.

Ladok for employees

KTH Transfer to Ladok

1. Course evaluation and course development

To continuously improve courses, students, doctoral students, and teachers are given the opportunity to provide feedback and reflect on courses through tools such as course surveys and course analyses. At the end of each course, students and doctoral students can share their opinions through a course survey directly in Canvas. Course surveys are automated, but as a teacher you have several options to adapt the survey to suit your course. The survey is published for students in Canvas on the Monday after the course end date, or on a date you have chosen. Students always have 11 days to respond to the survey.

Based on the survey results, two reports are automatically generated — one with free-text responses and one without. The report without free-text responses is the one published in the Canvas course room together with the course analysis once it is completed.

Course evaluation and course development

2. Course analysis

As the course coordinator, you must write a course analysis within 7 weeks after the course end date. You complete the course analysis in Canvas alongside the survey results and publish it in the course room within 7 weeks of the course’s end date. If you do not complete a course analysis, the report containing the survey results will still be published.

When a course analysis is published, one of the sections — regarding planned changes for the next course offering — is also published on the “About course” page under “Course Development.”

Conducting a course analysis

3. Data-informed education at KTH

As a university, KTH strives to offer high-quality education through the effective and powerful integration of digital tools. KTH therefore recognizes the potential benefits of data-informed learning for understanding and optimizing learning and the environments in which it takes place. Note that data-informed education and data-informed learning are sometimes referred to as learning analytics.

Data-informed education at KTH