Education Officer Blog

Here's a quick update on three of the SU Top Tens which I am working towards.

Decolonising the Curriculum - Create and commit to a specific action plan for decolonising the curriculum.

Decolonisation is currently a standing agenda item at Education Standards Quality Committee, and at each meeting a faculty or school will provide an update of the work happening within their departments. Engineering and Design presented the incredible work they have started particularly focusing on decolonising Architecture. HSS will be the next faculty to present at EQSC on the 16 March 2021.  All Faculty / School Learning Teaching Quality Committee's which meet regularly have been asked to include decolonisation as a standing agenda item. There are some concerns surrounding the progress departments are making particularly as discussions are shifting towards general inclusion rather than decolonisation. This is in line with the university’s previous commitments to include decolonisation within the inclusivity strand of Curriculum Transformation. We have spoken to Peter Lambert and will be designing an action plan for departments to fill with their plans and progress regarding decolonisation. We are also in the process of planning a session focusing on decolonisation with the previous Education Officer Ruqia Osman, more details to be shared shortly.

Lecture Capture - Introduce a policy for all students to be able to access recordings of all their lectures.

Francesco and I met with the Pro-Vice-Chancellor for Learning and Teaching and the President of UCU Bath to discuss a digital recordings policy last week. There has been lots of positive progress as we enhance the previous lecture capture policy draft into a more suitable policy that ensures all sessions are recorded or a suitable alternative is offered. We have gone through the current guidance and inputted into the new proposed policy, there are still several stages where it needs to be checked and approved but we are hoping the final approval will be at Senate in April.

Placements - Produce clear guidance and communication with our placement students to ensure that impacts due to Covid-19 are mitigated as much as possible.

One of our key priorities this year was to ensure that placement students, and students due to go on placement are supported particularly in relation to the developing pandemic situation. We became aware that Brexit had also added some additional barriers. We created this survey that close on the 7 February 2021 at 17:00pm (GMT). We will then go through this and identify key themes which will then be shared with the placement managers across the different faculties and raised at Resilient Curriculum to make sure that placement students are being fully supported.

If you would like to support of be involved in any of the above please do drop me a message at sueducation@bath.ac.uk!