Staff Student Rep Meeting – Wednesday 15th March 2023
In attendance: Bjoern Franke Director of Teaching, Philippa Ward Head of Student Services, Toni Noble Deputy Teaching Organisation Manager, Dimitrios Rakovitis Senior Computing Support Officer, Marjorie Brewer Student Adviser, Chrissy Harris Student Adviser, Kendal Reid ITO
UG1
The students met with the Course Organiser last week to discuss the issues they were having and the Course Organiser brought this up in the lecture. Assignment 3 Part one is due on Friday 17th at 1200 but the students have reported that the instructions for the assignment are not clear and they are feeling very anxious about this, especially for the students who have not done coding or Java before.
*Action: Bjoern to talk to the Course Organiser*
Outcome: The Course Organiser has agreed to move the deadline to Monday 20th at 1200 and will be holding an extra help session tomorrow (Friday) at 1715 on Zoom.
UG2
INF2-IADS coursework 2 was released 2 weeks later than it should have been, resulting in the deadline now clashing with other coursework’s.
INF-FDS the students like the fact that for Final Project Coursework they can either choose to work in teams of 2 or 3 or individually.
INF2-SEPP the coursework advice document was released 3 days before the deadline and the students had to go back into their coursework to make changes! The Guest lecture was good and they enjoy the group work. The group work can become unbalanced as groups can be allocated to 4 students and sometimes one group member could go onto interruption and the others have to pick up the slack.
INF2D the coursework is too long and repetitive.
UG
CT the grades have still not been returned but they are kept up to date via Piazza.
*Action Bjoern*
ST the grades have still not been returned and they have received no information about this!
*Action Bjoern*
FNLP, CS and CT the coursework is good.
CS there has to be a level of standardisation with tutors, some tutors just read of the marking scheme and some go that extra mile and have slides and discussions prepared in advance.
Project Endorsements selections have to be done by the 24th March, it was asked if this deadline could be extended?
*Action Bjoern*
UG4
The students are busy with their Dissertation, they have lot of report writing to do as well which is taking time away from them to work on their Dissertations.
It was asked if the second markers for the Dissertations are random and Bjoern explained that they aren’t, second markers can view a page that is sent out and the markers can select yes, no or maybe for being a second marker, depending on their project interest. It was also asked if a project can be co-supervised and the answer was yes as long as the students discusses this with their main supervisor.
General
Teaching Committee Meeting on the 26th April will be discussing how to go forward with 4th Year Projects with suggestions such as running them for the full year or only doing Project work in Semester 2, possibility of doing them individually or in clusters. The Reps are invited to attend.
Upcoming strike days are 15th, 16th, 17th, 20th, 21st and 22nd. Bjoern asked the Reps to inform the ITO int@inf.ed.ac.uk of any teaching activities they have been affected. by.
An email will be sent out soon to all students informing them of the transition of Personal Tutors to Student Advisers, UG1 and MSc already have Student Advisers but at the start of Semester one in September all students will be allocated Student Advisers.
Dimitrios has asked the Reps to pass the information onto their year groups, that the students have to check their University email accounts, they are required to sign in every 6 months, as they expire after 6 months, reminders will go their University emails not their personal accounts. He also mentioned that Computing Support is looking to employ 2 summer internships and the deadline is this coming Friday.
Some students are having access issues to Appleton Tower after hours.
*Action Pippa to contact Dave Hamilton*