Staff Student Rep Meeting – Wednesday 19th October 2022
In attendance: Neil Heatley Head of Informatics Student Services, David Sterratt Deputy Director of Teaching, Toni Noble Deputy Teaching Organisation Manager, Jose Garcia Student Adviser, Dimitrios Rakovitis Senior Computing Support Officer, Kendal Reid ITO
Apologies: Bjoern Franke, Director of Teaching
UG1
INF1A the drop in labs are very helpful.
CL the issues from last week which was causing confusion with the tutorial questions has now been well explained by the Course Organiser.
The occupancy of the Gordon Aikman Building last week, resulting in lectures having to be moved, cancelled or online wasn’t ideal but the students were happy that they got the CL lecture rearranged to the Informatics Forum. The students would also like for the course reading to be made available on a Friday or Saturday!
ILA all lectures were moved to online due to the occupancy, the students found these hard to access and hard to understand.
UG2
DMP is very good.
INF2-FDS workshop this week was very good.
INF2-CS the labs are reported to be overran, very busy and only one demonstrator appears to be available. They would like more support when it comes to setting up GitHub, the feel that this set up should have been given at the start of the semester! There also needs to be more alignment between the coursework and the lectures.
UG3
ILP is there an update on the issues regarding the Piazza page comments?
*Action Neil/Bjoern*
MLG is a new course replacing IAML, as MLG is new there are no past papers available, it may be that IAML past papers may be helpful. The students are unsure what will be examined it was suggested that the students to talk to the Course Organiser.
UG4
HCI the course is reported to be to theoretical, there are no tutorials and the coursework is not carefully designed.
TTDS is very well taught and although the lectures are 2 hours long, the students enjoy the examples given and the demonstrations on how to run code.
CARD the lecturer is very good and the students who were granted extensions where given an extra lab which was well received.
BDL is a 10 credit course, there are 4 pieces of coursework, as the course is 100% coursework the students feel that although coursework was meant to be reduced by 25% they feel that the content off the course compared to last year has increased!
*Action Bjoern*
MLP the students were given 10 days to submit coursework and they found the coursework to be time consuming!
MSc
RA there are few practical samples given but the students would like more slides to be made available. There are 20 students taking the course and around 10 of the students were struggling with the first tutorial as there was a lot of Maths, and there is too much theory and not enough applications. David suggested taking this to the Course Organiser.
General
The Examination Diet will be released the week commencing the 31st October.
David asked if the students would like to hold a session of what to expect when sitting an exam on campus, some students have voiced that they have concerns about this, as some of them have never had anything other than an online examination. There is also concerns that the 2 hour time slot to sit the exam is much different to be it being online, although the students had 2 hours to do the exam and one hour to upload, they used this extra hour to work on the submission.
It was asked why some courses that are in semester 1 are examined in semester 2, the reasoning behind this is the December diet is only 2 weeks long and the April diet is 4 weeks, so there is more time to schedule exams in the April diet.
Can the ventilation override switches on level 9 be removed?
*Action Neil*
Dimitrios has asked the Reps to remind all students that none of the machines in the labs should be switched off, or any disconnect any of the devices, these machines have programmes and updates running and switching the machines delays the process!