Monday I worked at home and this enabled me to catch up on lots of admin so great and start my key note presentation I am giving at a conference in Birmingham on 9th December.
Tuesday I travelled to Sheffield Hallam for the day where I was chairing the SEDA conference committee for a meeting where we were exploring the conference abstracts for May 2012 conference and agreeing the theme for November 2012 conference and some of the key note speakers.
Wednesday I was in the University for three key meetings. The University APPSC met and I have outlined key items here.
The undergraduate APE’s have been moved to a later deadline this year to take account of NSS issues etc and will come to February school BOS meetings
There is now a UKBA Tier 4 policy in place for schools and a new member of academic services who starts on 12th December w2ill over see this
The two thematic groups and schools are finalising plans to go through the subgroups of senate and then a tentative plan will go to ex-co and then council in January and a final plan to both in March. I am on the Education and Student Experience group which met again last week on our researchers day so I could not go but there were 25 of us who had written papers which apparently have been grouped by theme and voted on and there will be further information about next stage of voting/prioritising soon
The APPSC for the University reviewed new terms of reference for the committee and approved these and a new name which is now called the Education Committee
The Student Union updated us on an audit they had done on programme reps which are now 493 in number with an even split between UG and PG students. Most schools have good cover except SEMS but this is being sorted. The Stars conference had 94 students registered and 60 attended but some of these had to be in class. Seven members of the SU are going to the NUS annual conference including one PhD student. The new student working community group met for the first time and the SU are looking at how to take activities forward but it is clear students affiliate themselves with programmes and schools and not the University and so this is where they will start
The Key Information Set (KIS) working group will start to work ASAP I am on that for us this will probably be January now. The chair is a professor from CASS. This is for UG programmes only. The way information is collated is that it is assumed students do 120 credits per year using the most popular routes in relation to the number of students where there are electives. The timetables being used then for calculations are the 11-12 ones. The learning and teaching are then taken from the module specifications using three categories which are not negotiable and are scheduled, independent and placement. These are then represented as a % across programmes. The average teaching hours expected across the higher education sector for scheduled teaching is 18 hours and so there was a long discussion about the hours across programmes at City. Many felt their programmes met and this for Health and SEMS the programmes probably exceeded this for UG students. There was a also a long discussion around the KIS learning and teaching definitions that have to be used for this activity which HEFEC also had produced. All this would require changes in PRISM but also for the assessment methods choices where again there was a list and programmes would have to publish the % of examinations and coursework etc. The information for KIS had to be sent to HEFEC in July 2012 and so PRISM changes needed to made ASAP using the KIS lists. All UG programmes would then need revising to ensure programme and module specifications met these requirements and were clear about the hours by March 2012.
The Learning and Teaching plan was progressing and again it was acknowledged that this was a compliance plan and not developmental but this was due to the many areas not progressed for the last year and the forth coming institutional review. The list of areas to be addressed was very long and so there was a need to prioritise what was needed this year and what could be deferred to the next year. There was a discussion about these areas and it was agreed to put on hold programme director development however the discussion around the personal tutor forum raised issues again about variability across schools and how this also impacted on NSS. It was agreed to bring back to the next meeting the previous review undertaken 18 months ago. Otherwise the lists were agreed.
There were changes to the your voice survey for years 1 and 2 this year so they reflected the NSS questions and there would be information buttons on many areas to help students understand what was being asked. This was seen as really helpful. The your voice surveys were going to run from 6th February the same as the NSS because the plan is now to run all surveys together for students.
There was information about the institutional review with a key dates outlined and there would be further information about who would be in the main groups for this.
There was a discussion about external examiners and the number not yet in place in schools which included us with Stephanie leaving. There was mention of the new criteria making this difficult however this was not felt to be an issue and a paper would be going to ex-co related to the numbers outstanding.
Carol Vielba from CASS who had previously commented on PODS and lack of information wished the board to note how much better the PODS are since the rebuild and wanted that acknowledged for who had been involved so great news.
There was to be an assessment board review for areas such as extenuating circumstances and this work was to be done for July 2012.
There are now revised programme approval forms for stage I and stage II which are to be used from now so all academics who sign these off please be aware and take time to look at these on the website.
Programme student representatives were now also going to be on periodic review panels and there was a debate about whether this should be as a pilot or for all this year. It was agreed where appropriate all programmes and I suggested the MA Academic Practice would be good for this.
Following this meeting I went straight into the Learning development Advisory board as did all the ADE’s and we discussed and agreed the learning development projects for this year. I will letting all applicants know over the weekend and will provide more information about the projects for each school next week.
Following this we all also had the Learning Development Board of Studies. At this meeting some minor amendments for assessments on the MA were agreed, the APE for the MA 2010- 2011 and the MPhil/PhD 2010 -2011 programmes were approved. There were some other smaller items of business.
Thursday well less to report hurrah a few meetings with staff from across the University about some projects and some members of the team but otherwise a chance to catch up on the e-mails.
Friday I had a few meetings with staff again from across the University and was able to again catch up on a bit of admin.
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