Assessment Group 2nd meeting
This group met for the second time. As noted before, this group has been set up for a short period of time to review the policies for extenuating circumstances and appeals. This meeting looked at issues around whether there could be distinctions around minor and major circumstances and therefore the impact on students. Some Schools are using these. However following much discussion there was concern around equality related to this and how impact of circumstances will vary for students. There is to be further discussion at the next meeting.
Senate Meeting 7th March
There were two main items that took most of the time and are of interest to us the proposed graduate school and the next steps of the strategic plan for 2012-2016.
GRADUATE SCHOOL this had been originally proposed via e-mail and had met with some resistance in terms of the proposal but also the mode of consultation. This proposal has since been to a range of groups and committees and the paper was now very different. There continued to be quite a lot of discussion around this being for PhD students only and not other postgraduates and the issue of being virtual with a limited budget. The school is however important for the REF and will enable better co-ordination of student development and training. Some further work is going to be done but it is hoped that this will be approved at Council on 26th March.
STRATEGIC PLAN 2012-2016 there has been some work on the next stage of the vision and this includes an area on education, knowledge transfer and estates. The developments include some high level objectives and comments were made at Senate. Following this further amendments were made and this again is waiting for approval at council on 26th March. Once this is approved there will be work on the learning and teaching strategy and we will be involved so as soon as I have information about this I will let you know.
W/B 12th March 2012
Heads of Education Development Group (HEDG) 16th March
This group meets once a month to discuss issues common across Universities. There was a presentation from Exeter about how they have created a framework for experienced staff to meet standards of the Higher Education Academy Framework so they could gain associate fellowship, fellowship, senior and principle fellowship. This provided an option for those who do not do a teaching programme and for those who want to gain senior and principle fellowships not covered by a teaching programme. The process starts with a workshop about the framework and then those interested complete an application and gain their manager support. Some support workshops are provided and then the assessment for each stage offers an option. All applicants for each stage submit a mapping against the appropriate standard and two references one of which must be internal and then they can choose whether to do 4 × 500 word case studies demonstrating how they practice at the level or a 20 minute presentation to a panel and 10 minutes Q & A. The panel reviews all submissions and discusses recommendations. The panel has senior staff from each faculty as well as from their development centre. All staff receive written feedback whether successful or not.
The benefits of the scheme have been identifying great practice and those who could do applications for the national teaching fellows scheme, the wide range of staff involved in the scheme and assessing and the managers support. This is something we might wish to consider developing in the future.
There was brief session on “what’s on top” this enables sharing of things that are an issues at present so issues raised were:
- Increasing student engagement in a range of activities
- Increased trade union interest in learning and teaching activity and areas like module evaluations and teaching awards and how decisions are made
- An increase in student complaints about teaching quality, personal tutoring and assessment and supervision issues
- Many institutions undergoing wholesale curriculum redesign but focused on credit framework changes
- Student employability
Some of these issues are beginning to raise themselves at City so student complaints and increasing student engagement.
The reward and recognition, future development and research by the HEA was discussed by Caroline Stainton. She provided an up date on a range of areas. The HEA are about to undertake a review of the NTFS there may be changes for 2013. There is to be a greater focus on student led awards and there is already information on the website about some research.
Finally HEDG have one of the JISC digital literacy projects and the project officer provided an up date but this was going well.
KIS (Key Information Set) for Undergraduate programme 21st March
These meetings are to discuss the information that will posted on websites for all UG programmes from September 2012 and this is compulsory for all Universities from HEFEC and will enable students and others to compare programmes much more easily. The format is prescribed by HEFEC and the areas that will be shown but this included teaching hours, assessments types, salary that can expected as a new graduate and NSS scores to name a few. On 29th March the final guidance will be published so more information after this time.
