TC Agenda 13th November 2019

Teaching Committee Agenda

TC Agenda 13th November 2019

Teaching Committee Agenda

 

19.78: Apologies for absence:

John Lee, Paulo Guagliardo, Helen Pain

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19.79: Minutes of Previous Meetings

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19.80: Matters Arising

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19.27: Exam Marking Policy

The existing policy on exam marking was inspected.  The policy is fit for purpose but needs modification to take account of marking for large classes.  The additional section on control of examination scripts was accepted and will be appended to the two marking policy documents.

Action: Add section to policies - ITO OUTSTANDING

Main Elements – The Course Organiser is responsible for the security of the Exam Scripts. Scripts have been left on trains or lost in the past. Lecturers that are marking need to let ITO know where they are marking the scripts.

Main Change – Course Organisers will arrange a marking party, which will be in Informatics at all times, this can be in a couple of room but has to stay here and the CO should be able to oversee this. A separate policy should be created for online exams.

Action: Bring online exam marking policy to next TC - Stuart Anderson

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19.56: Alteration of Exam Scripts

Proposing two options – Fully open book and partially open book and to add additional standard wordings that can be appended to any of the current standard rubrics. All members of the committee were happy to go ahead with this.

Action: Add two new rubric types to the exam template – RAT team (ITO has asked Computer support to do this and they are working on it) – IN PROGRESS

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18.63: Teaching Programme Review (now Internal Programme Review)

Programme Specific Remits. What are the priorities for the TPR to look into?

Space – Needs reviewed for the next couple of years for teaching as we have an increase of numbers every year. There needs to be more lab space, and would be good for the MSc students to have an area.

Students Mental Health – Support for student’s mental health and disabilities needs to be reviewed. There should be more staff to deal with this. Many students are having to wait weeks for mental health counselling. The Disability Service needs more people to cope with the pressure. Welfare Hub’s new building should be open by December so hopefully this will help as they will be able to employ more staff.

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19.04: Establishing a Welfare and Support Sub-Committee of Teaching Committee

DoLT drew attention to the issue that decisions made by the School did not automatically take into account the effect on the welfare of the student body. In effect the proposed Sub-Committee would act like an independent watchdog in welfare and support matters. The proposal was approved.

ACTION: Recruitment to sub-committee - Senior PT – OUTSTANDING ACTION

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19.66: Teaching Lunches - Call for Topics

The following topics for Teaching Lunches have been brought forward:

October 2019: Higher education academy schemes

November 2019:  Common marking scheme and set small exemplars of what categories A1 + A2 look like (‘what does excellence look like’).

Other and Future Topics:

Moderation; ELDR (course design workshop by IAD).

ACTION – send information out to teaching staff - Gillian Bell – IN PROGRESS

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19.63 Exam Script Viewing – Paul Jackson

Can we give the honours students sample solutions for them to see when they are looking over their marked exam script in the ITO office?

An idea could be that the Course Organiser looks through the scripts and identifies the common mistakes in the paper and then can give overall feedback on questions to all students on the course. This is also beneficial for the Course Organiser because it introduces reflection on questions and teaching.

ACTION: Find examples from Manchester Maths department for the next Teaching Committee to see if we can adopt as part of our policy. – Paul Jackson

ACTION: Discuss this at College Level learning and Teaching Committee. Ask other Directors of Learning and Teaching at other schools. - Stuart Anderson

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19.71 MSc Dissertation Page Length Checking – Iain Murray

Feedback given by staff shows that a large majority think it’s a positive change. There is a big reduction in the number of pages to look at and has made the students focus more on what points they are making in the dissertation.  There was a concern that students would move information to appendices, but appendices seemed to be used sensibly. Proposal to do the same again next year as this worked as intended, unless there is strong disagreement for it.

ACTION: Look into making instructions and need exam PC’s to be networked. ITO could run the PG check if they have instructions on how to do this. – Iain Murray

This is only applied to the MSc cohort and not undergraduate. UG have no page limit, could look into getting this implemented also.

ACTION: Include a ‘how to write a 40 page dissertation’ in the IPP.  Bjoern Franke

ACTION: Bring a similar proposal to TC for undergraduate dissertations.  Stuart Anderson

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19.81 AOB

The following two papers are discussion papers arising from actions on DoLT.  The goal is to discuss these in order to get input for a paper to be adopted as procedure/policy at the next Teaching Committee:

  • Moderation of assessed work (attached).
  • Online Examinations (attached).

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19.82 – Date of next Teaching Committee

4th December 2019