Meeting Report

This week’s meeting was back in AT2.07, undisturbed by fire alarms, and had class reps from all years as well as Colin Stirling (Year 2 Organiser). Full report below.

Discrete Mathematics and Mathematical Reasoning
The two larger tutorial groups have now moved to bigger rooms, and student reps reported positively on a more focused presentation of the lectures and tutorials.
Advanced Natural Language Processing
Course lecturers have arranged a Q&A session for students working on the current assignment. Carolyn Ladd, class rep, has been gathering students to participate.
Update: The session ran that afternoon, with around half the students on the course taking part.
Third-year workload
Reps are planning to prepare some advice for third-year students on how to plan and manage their work, in time for second semester and the particular challenge of the System Design Project. This might be a web page or a leaflet of some kind.
Inf2A Python labs
The class reps reported comments from students that these were not as helpful as they might be, because their was no overall staff guidance during the sessions. Demonstrators are good but can only help people with individual problems.
Update: Colin Stirling has relayed this to the lecturers, who have also organised drop-in help sessions for the coursework assignments.
Access to online discussion groups
Some students are still unable to view the forums on http://www.forums.ed.ac.uk. Ian reported that there is a systematic fault in account synchronization between EASE and the forums, which computing staff are working to fix. The launch of the common Informatics 1 forum has been delayed until we know more about this.
Update: No global fix yet, but any student unable to view the forum should ask Information Services to give them access by filling out the online help form or mailing IS.Helpline@ed.ac.uk and explaining that their account is being refused. IS can usually fix individual accounts within the day.
Fourth-year projects
Zsolt Ero, school rep, reported that some students feel they are getting very little contact with their project supervisor. This is a concern: the course web page gives clear guidance on this, and if not followed then students should contact their supervisors and then, if necessary, the project coordinator Don Sannella.
Update: Zsolt has mailed all project students with this advice and references to the guidance in the course web pages.
December exam timetable
MSc class reps asked about courses that have exam times in December published by the University Registry, but where the lecturers say the exams are at the end of next semester. It turns out that some of these exams are only for visiting students here for just one semester. Students can check with the ITO or their lecturer when their exam will fall: some courses, such as Probabilistic Modelling and Reasoning do examine all students this semester.
Lecture slides online
There had been earlier reports of slides for Human-Computer Interaction and Computer Graphics not being posted online. This has now been fixed, and reps reported that these problems had not recurred.
Return of coursework
Ian asked about timely return of coursework and feedback. The reps reported that students on Introductory Applied Machine Learning (IAML) say they do not know when coursework will be returned. Ian recommended they ask the lecturers, and he will do this too.
Note: School statement on coursework, assessment and feedback
Update: The IAML course web page now lists return dates for all coursework assignments.
Informatics Research Review
Class reps reported wide variation in activity between different tutors, not all following course guidance. Ian recommended they contact the course organiser about this, which he will also do.
Student meeting
The School reps, Zsolt Ero and James Hulme, plan to organise a meeting for all Informatics students. There was some discussion as to whether Informatics teaching staff, in particular Ian and Michael, should or should not take part.
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