The Manifesto Review DPE

I warn you now that this article is a bit dry but that is just the way I am.

I ran for theDeputy President (Education) role as I really enjoyed the Chemistry Dep Rep position and loved voicing the students’ point of view. I also found the subject of higher education very interesting when reading random articles on BBC news.

From being DPE I have learnt how to use Microsoft Outlook extensively, organise my time between soooo many meetings, committee meeting etiquette, how a world leading university operates and coordinating a team of devoted academic reps.

The one thing I wasn’t expecting though was the large number of long meetings I had to attend so there is student representation and thenational Quality Assurance Agency is happy (they decide whether an institution can award degrees or not). However it is crucial that a student representative is present at these meetings and I do get a better oversight of what is taking place across the College.

My manifesto review is on the right and hopefully you are glad you voted for me and not RON.

“Increase SOLE participation rates across the college and make sure the results are acted upon.”

Autumn SOLE got a 67% overall turnout across the College, which is the highest it’s been in years. Departmental staff across the College are taking SOLE more seriously now, than they did a few years ago and in every department they push you to fill it in.

However, the academic rep system also did its part to increase the participation rates, as I sent out daily year by year breakdown of participation rates to the Dep Reps and sent this information to the year reps three times a week. I also worked with ICT to get pop-ups appearing on login for those students who had not started SOLE in the second week.

However, I feel the participation rate can be improved upon for spring and summer SOLE, so I will be finding more inventive ways for this to happen.

To make sure the results are shown to academic reps, I will be producing a paper on Staff Student Committees, which will go to the College’s Quality Assurance and Enhancement Committee and this will state whether SOLE is being discussed.

“Encourage faculties and departments to set up exchange programmes with other world class universities outside Europe.”

I initially submitted a paper to Faculty of Natural Sciences (FoNS) Teaching Committee, as I was invited to give a presentation, as all departments in FoNS (apart from Chemistry) only have year abroad partners in Europe. This paper meant that the Director of Postgraduate Studies in Physics also attended the Rector’s trip to the USA and she asked the universities they attended about potential studying abroad schemes.

I also ran an International Mobility survey in November and the report should be available in the next few weeks, which I plan to submit to interested parties and the College’s Strategic Education Committee.

“Work towards achieving personalised feedback on exams through personal tutor meetings.”

In the 2011 student experience survey 87% of undergraduate respondents stated they wanted exam feedback via their personal tutor. This already takes place within life sciences and I stated this as good practise in the 2012 NSS Response.

As part of the Pro Rector (Education)’s consultation process for Imperial’s educational strategy, she is including the academic representatives’ opinion on the Education and Representation Board (both UG and PG). Within this group I have given them the chance to say whether they think the College should adopt this level of exam feedback and the Pro Rector (Education) can take this into consideration.

“Improve graduate prospects by creating an Imperial student forum for internships and year in industry placements.”

I am still planning on doing this but with an added feature for all students to use to help them study.

“Raise awareness of student representation”

In November 2012 Icoordinated a Rep Week, which saw academic reps wearing bright rep “Love your rep” t-shirts and we managed to collect 448 suggestions, which were then sent to their reps to bring up at staff-student committees. This allowed you to easily identify your reps in person, rather than just by email. I also got personalised polos for your Dep Reps and Faculty Union Academic Officers at the start of the year.

In addition to this, I asked each Departmental Society committee to set up a Freshers’ Facebook group in Easter 2012, in order for there to be a greater sense of community within each year and allows your academic reps to communicate with you via a different medium.

The A-Z reps system was also launched in November, which allows any student to find any academic rep in any department and is regularly updated. If you log into Imperial College Union’s website it will even show you who your rep is on the “Your Union” page.

“Carry on the former DPE’s work, which includes campaigning for lecture podcasts and improving the buddy system.”

Lecture podcasts

So at the end of the last academic year, the College publicly stated that it plans to roll out audio and video lecture podcasts. This is taking place over the next few years but students are generally disgruntled by the speed this is happening. ICT are rolling it out at a steady pace as they wish to ensure the quality of the service e.g. make sure they can handle the large amount of data uploaded every day. Paul and I both gave the College silver with respect to this in the NSS response for the slow rolling out pace and have had a meeting with ICT regarding this issue, reiterating that students aren’t happy with it taking so long.

Mums and Dads

This year the buddy scheme was rebranded as Mums and Dads, which saw the highest percentages of Freshers entering their data and the highest number of parents signing up to the scheme. This was accomplished by me working with the Departmental Societies and Dep Reps over the summer. This also would not have been possible without the Union System Administrator, Philip Kent setting up the online matching system and showing the live percentages by subject (this proved very useful for the Dep Socs and Dep Reps).

At the start of term I attended the ICSMSU Mums and Dads event to find any good practise, which I found a lot of. From attending this I arranged the Great Soc Off, where 450 students paid to get into Metric on a Thursday night. Since the feedback on the night was so good we are running Soc Off 2.0 on 7th March, which I promise will be even better (for one, we aren’t kicking people out at midnight).

To try and improve Mums and Dads 2013, we are currently looking into training the newly elected Departmental Societies in the summer term, so they can start planning over the summer holidays and I personally would want a Soc Off in the second week of the Autumn term.