Posted on Tue 21 Jun 2022 at 12:57 by
Jacob Withington As my Officer year is coming to a close, before I leave you in the very capable hands of Julia my successory from the 27th June I thought I would reflect on some of my manifesto commitments from this year.
It has been wonderful to work with all our amazing academic and faculty reps who volunteer their time to ensure your course runs in your best interests. It is a great experience I would recommend to anyone
Manifesto projects
Reading Week: I presented to Education Board the benefit and student desire for reading weeks. This initiated conversations at each faculty/school to explore introducing them on more courses in the coming years and the possibility of aligning them in faculties, recognising that sometimes they work best when timed with assessments on a course. I have also worked with the Centre for Learning & Teaching to put out guidance on how best to utilise reading weeks.
Rep Tool: After many months of collecting feedback from reps on what they would want a tool for students to report issues to them to look like and lost of research into what was out there and what is possible. We are now pursuing a ticketing system facilitated with the help of the university Digital, Data and Technology team to enable cohorts to more easily send feedback, suggestions and questions to their rep. This will also allow themes across departments, faculties and the university to be seen allowing reps at every level to have more representative information. It will also enable briefings to be more easily made so when my successors attend a meeting and study space comes up they can quickly collate this feedback to provide a representative input. We hope for this to launch in semester 1 of 2022/23.
Online Unit Evaluations (OUEs): As part of Curriculum Transformation OUEs are having to be updated so the system works for these new courses. Through our input in this we managed to initiate a much larger project to improve the whole of OUEs which will hopefully start in the new year. The aim of this is to increase engagement with them and how useful they are to students and staff. This will look at timings, promotion, the platform, how the data is collected and how it fits in with our other systems.
Other Work
Study Space: I have pushed this year for the need to consider the study space required when making decisions on how teaching is done. There is still a great need for suitable spaces for students to join online content in individual rooms, even in my last weeks I am pushing for this. With the help of Annie we managed to get the new building 10E open to all students with it's vast spaces for studying and teaching. It is important spaces on campus are fully utilised when large sums of tuition fees go into them and the impact they have on the environment.
SSLCs: I have initiated a project to look at how we can improve how SSLCs function to ensure they are a welcoming place for reps, where their voice is valued, they can shape the department and their time is utilised. This is ongoing but was initiated by a piece of work I have been doing looking at how our rep system functions overall, how each rep is equipped with feedback and can engage with the university. This has resulted in the creation of Department Chairs who will sit on Faculty Execs to have a direct line to and from thir Faculty Reps and the Education Officer, enabling issues to be escalated and fed down. This work along with the SSLC and rep tool will hopefully make the rep system more representative and functional.
Late Submissions: During semester 2 exams I was informed about the late submissions process. I quickly intervened to improve the comms the university was putting out and raising my concerns. This escalated when many students got in contact with us with their stories of rejection in this process and how it affected them, let alone the injustice felt. With the incredible work of Annie our SU President while I was away we pushed the university to fix this situation. This resulted in the IMC deadline being extended for students disagreeing with their rejection or who's performance was affected by getting a rejection in the middle of exams. This was a sudden issue with injustices that were bought to our attention by the many students raising it, so thank you for getting involved in our SU and raising your voice. While the result may not have been ideal it showed the university the importance of remembering that they, the people applying these rules have not done online exams so do not understand what it is like.
This is just some of the many pieces of work I have done this year, some planned for and some reactive, it has been great fun and kept me busy along with the 30+ committees I sit on representing you! If you are interested in any of this work and the role do get in touch with the current Education Officer.