Staff Student Rep Meeting – Wednesday 25th January 2023

In attendance: Bjoern Franke, Director of Teaching, Suzanne Newall Student Adviser, Kendal Reid ITO

Suzanne introduced herself to the Reps and explained that she is a Student Adviser, and the team act as UG1 Personal Tutors, Bjoern explained that Personal tutors for all years will be phased out in September and they will be replaced by Students Advisers covering all years.

Bjoern reminded the Reps that EUSA sent out an reminder email about becoming a Student Representative in 2023/24 and asked if the Reps could bring this to the attention of their year groups.

UG1

Calculus and Its Applications have quizzes to do on a Thursday in a two hour slot but there is a lecture in this time scale, Bjoern advised talking to the Course Organiser.

UG2

INF2-FDS and INF2-IADS it is reported that there are a lot of errors being made especially in the slides, errors with the lecturers writing on the whiteboards and also a lot of reading.  The students feel that there are basically self-learning on these course.

*Action Bjoern*

UG3

ILP the students have been waiting for their marks but haven’t had any communication.

*Bjoern to talk to the Course Organiser*

MLG is a new course and there is no previous exam papers to view.  The School is aware of this and they are keeping an eye on the results.

SDM the students would like more lectures to be in person and not recordings, they feel like they would like more interaction in the course other than labs and Q&A sessions.  They feel that the lectures have not moved on since the pandemic and sitting on you own watching a lecture on a laptop isn’t the same as being able to attend the lecture with their fellow students and being able to discuss things amongst themselves.

*Action Bjoern to talk to the lecturer*

ST is a semester one course and is worth 10 credits, it is 100% coursework and the final deadline is this upcoming Friday, although the deadline was extended the students feel the deadline should have been set at the end of week one when they is not a lot of coursework’s going on but week two they have work to do.  There is also a concern over a delay in marks being returned due to extensions being granted when the students had 5 months to complete the assessment.

UG4

BDL had 4 coursework’s and 2 were due over the Christmas break, which interfered with their Dissertations, the School is looking into reviewing this.

MSc

No issues to report.

General

There are some concerns over the upcoming strike action as there are 18 days altogether scattered over February and March, there is especially concern with the final year students who will be working on their Dissertation and there are concerns that their Supervisors may not meet with them.  Bjoern explained that anyone striking has no obligation to say if they plan to strike and the School is not at liberty to ask, as strike action is aimed at causing as much disruption as possible.  If a student encounters any issues with not being able to meet with their Supervisor to contact the Student Advisers based on level 6 Appleton Tower.

It was asked if Informatics were able to give level 9 access to Engineering students doing an Informatics Dissertation, Bjoern said that this was not possible as level 9 is an only Informatics students space, it is not possible to give access to other Schools, we are already encountering students from other Schools being let into to level 9, which is not allowed.  There are lots of open areas in the central area other Schools can use.