Academic Representation Impact Report 2013/14

IMPA

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REPO

RT 2013/14

All of this was supported by the Academic Representation staff team:

ALEX LOUCHVice-President Academic Affairs

JAMES SMITHAcademic Representation Manager

DAVID WOOLLEYAcademic Representation Co-ordinator

• This year saw the University of Exeter Students’ Guild recognised for the National Union of Students / Higher Education Authority Students' Union and Institution Partnership Award 2014

• The National Union of Students presented the Students' Guild with the prestigious Academic Representation Award

• The Students' Guild's Teaching Awards saw 2,601 student nominations, totalling over 250,000 words, submitted for 709 members of staff.

• For the first time, all taught academic representatives were democratically elected through the Students' Guild website. 660 candidates ran for academic posts on Student Staff Liaison Committees.

• In its first year, Research Uncovered saw 58 research projects showcased on the Guild website with 1,197 student votes split between them.

• The Students’ Guild supported the production of eight College-based Visions for the Future of Education, highlighting student priorities for change in each college.

• This year over 500 students attended 168 Student Staff Liaison Committees and 105 Postgraduate Research Liaison Forums.

HEA

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HEADLINES TEAM

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The Students’ Guild exists to make a positive difference in every student's Exeter Experience

WHAT IS ACADEMIC REPRESENTATION?The Students’ Guild plan for 2013 - 2016 notes that our three main priorities are Student Engagement and Participation,

Empowering Student Voice, and Working With Others. The Academic Representation team are at the heart of this agenda, helping students make change happen at the University. We do this in lots of ways:

Teaching Awards ------------------------------------The Students’ Guild hosts the largest student-led Teaching Awards in the UK, with more students participating and more staff nominated than at any other University. The Teaching Awards are an opportunity for students to thank staff for the hard work put into their education every year.

Research Uncovered --------------------------------Research Uncovered empowered students to find out more about the world-class research taking place at Exeter. Students voted for seven lecturers to showcase their research to a wider audience.

Academic Elections ---------------------------------For the first time, all of our academic reps, subject chairs, and college officers were democratically elected through the Students' Guild website. During the year, 660 students put themselves forward in the elections.

Mirror -----------------------------------------------The Mirror scheme supports staff and students to pair up for the day and shadow each other as they go about their daily life. The idea is to allow both parties to gain a better of how the University works, providing valuable insights to help develop the education at Exeter.

Student Staff Liaison Committees (SSLCs) ----------We support over 400 reps who attend SSLCs across the University. Our SSLCs reps are the first point of contact for any students hoping to raise a concern or make a change on their course. As a result, academic reps are some of the most important students at Exeter and make a fantastic contribution to the University.

Training ---------------------------------------------To ensure that all of our academic reps are well supported in their roles, the Students' Guild offers bespoke training for every rep. All sessions are run in conjunction with the students’ relevant college and aim to develop transferrable skills to assist reps in their roles.

Postgraduate Research Liaison Forums -------------Research Students attend PGRLFs instead of SSLCs. In contrast to SSLCs, PGRLFs have more control over the design and nature of their representation, allowing them to devise a system that suits them. Any research student is eligible to attend their departmental PGRLF.

Visions for the Future of Education -----------------Exeter now has seven college based Visions for the Future of Education, student-led documents that highlight our priorities for academic change at Exeter. A final document, the Medical School Vision, is coming soon.

CONTEXT

SSLCS

TR

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At the beginning of the academic year, over 450 academic reps were elected to SSLCs and PGRLFs. They have worked tirelessly to represent their peers and have achieved more than ever before. Here are a selection of their achievements:

• Politics SSLC ensured that all Politics students can now get feedback from their tutor on exams.

• The Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies SSLC ran a survey to find out what their students wanted. Better module options for PGTs, improvements to Arabic teaching, and improvements to the facilities of the IAIS building were implemented.

• The CEMPS College Officers have ensured that facilities have been updated in Harrison, so all small group teaching rooms now have air-conditioning.

• Law Subject Chairs have now arranged for E-Bart information to appear on every students’ MyExeter page.

• Anonymous marking will now take place at Camborne School of Mines.

• Following discussions in the Business School SSLC, the college will now be hosting their own Teaching Awards celebrations!

• Psychology SSLC live tweets updates from departmental meetings to keep all students abreast of developments.

• Engineering SSLC hosted Engineering Uncovered, a free event showcasing departmental research attended by over 100 students.

• Modern Languages is working with the department to review Study Abroad assessment and make sweeping changes for the future.

‘It’s awesome how much the training system has improved – in my first year (three years ago) there was not half as much encouragement or support.’

Third Year Academic Rep.

• This year, more academic reps than ever before attended a training session, with 75% of all reps across all campuses receiving bespoke college-level training.

• 80 out of 80 students who filled out a feedback form described the training sessions as either engaging or quite engaging.

• 76 out of 80 students found the training sessions to be useful and informative.

• Of the 57 Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences (HASS) students who provided feedback, only one rated a session as ‘poor’ in some areas. All other feedback was positive.

• Of the 23 Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths (STEM) students who provided feedback, all but three rated every aspect of the training as ‘good’ or ‘very good.’

STUDENT STAFF LIAISON COMMITTEES TRAINING

PGR

LFS

The Postgraduate Research Liaison Forums are now in the second full year, and continue to show a healthy level of attendance across the colleges. A few key wins are outlined below.

Key achievements this year include:

• Revisions to the Postgraduate Teaching Code of Good Practice mean that every Postgraduate Teaching Assistant will now receive an official contract, a fair selection process, and a fair rate of pay.

• Following feedback from PGRLFs, the Students' Guild has now introduced a new Postgraduate Research Officer to represent PGR students.

• For the first time, every PGRLF has had the opportunity to discuss and respond to their departmental Postgraduate Research Experience Survey data.

• In the College of Life and Environmental Sciences (CLES), revisions to the mentoring system have been implemented following student feedback.

• The Researcher Development Programme has collected an invaluable amount of feedback to tailor specific HASS and STEM education streams for the coming year.

• The Students'Guild's PGR Hidden Course Costs survey will now detail all expenses that research students encounter on a subject by subject basis.

POSTGRADUATE RESEARCH LIAISON FORUMS

VISIO

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The Visions for the Future of Education seek to ensure that every student has a chance to have their say on academic issues. A huge number of students have contributed to producing the Visions and the final products can be found at issuu.com/exeterguild

The information below should give some indication of how many people contributed to produce them:

Student consultation, as an infographic:

• 23 students had an active role providing written content or editing the Visions

• Every Subject Chair was invited to a one-to-one with Alex Louch, Vice-President Academic Affairs 2013/14, to offer feedback and confirm that they were happy with the content of the Visions

• 251 academic reps were asked what they would like to see change in the Visions at Rep training in 2013

• Data from eight focus groups was used to look at university wide issues, from specific issues like redeveloping MACE to broad conceptual questions about the Visions

• Data from nine Students' Guild or NUS surveys, addressed issues from opinions of course reps to questions on the Exeter experience.

As part of this project, Students' Guild staff read:

• 2415 individual Teaching Awards nominations

• 128 sets of SSLC minutes

• 58 sets of PGRLF minutes

• 18 sets of Academic Affairs minutes

• 2 years worth of data from the Guild Advice Unit

VISIONS FOR THE FUTURE OF EDUCATIONOther extensively used data included:

• National Student Survey (NSS) data for the past two years

• Postgraduate Taught Experience Survey (PTES) data for the past two years

• Postgraduate Research Experience Survey (PRES) data for the past two years

• The Students' Guild’s 2013 survey of academic reps

• INTO data for the past two years

• The National Union of Students (NUS) Postgraduate Teaching Survey

THE COLLEGE OF SOCIAL SCIENCES AND INTERNATIONAL STUDIES

THE BUSINESS SCHOOL

INTO

THE COLLEGE OF

HUMANITIES

THE COLLEGE OF LIFE &

ENVIROMENTAL SCIENCES

POSTGRADUATE

RESEARCH

1020

Vision for the Future of Education | CEMPS

10. ATTRACTING AND WELCOMING

OUTSTANDING NEW STUDENTS

Starting a degree at a new university is a daunting and challenging

experience for many students. The outstanding outreach portfolio

of CEMPS should be celebrated and shared. In particular, this year,

CEMPS students have expressed a great deal of appreciation for

the fact that they are very quickly immersed in departmental

life and rapidly involved in research culture. New students in

Humanities have given positive feedback on the relatively new

‘Your Exeter’ pages, where accepted students can find out a

bit more about what their department does, with everything

from information on staff research to student activities included.

Following this good practice, the Students’ Guild would support

CEMPS in setting up a ‘Your Exeter’ portal for all new students

who have accepted a place. 39

One group of students for whom welcome and integration is

of paramount importance in international students. Feedback

consistently highlights that both international and home students

really appreciate the idea of working in an international environment

with world-class students. However, several new students, both

postgraduate and undergraduate, have also commented that

they believe that there is not a sufficiently thorough induction

for international students integrating into the college. This is

perhaps particularly apparent with students progressing from

INTO, who have repeatedly reported a significant shift in teaching

experience when transferring to the college. Although there is

an appreciation of the staff support that INTO and international

students receive, there appears to be a consensus that more

could be done to prepare them for the changes they will face. The

final issue concerns academic misconduct, where INTO students

progressing to all colleges have called for a thorough induction

that prepares them for the particular assessment and plagiarism

procedures within their department. Naturally, the nature of this

will vary between departments, but in order to ensure the focus

on newly arrived INTO and international students remains strong,

it has been requested the following recommendation be included:

• Every international student should receive a thorough

induction to prepare them for life in the college that

features an enhanced focus on academic misconduct and

exam procedures.

One final point concerns providing new students with reflective

information from alumni who have completed the equivalent

degree, allowing them to anticipate problems ahead of time and

avoid mistakes. This year students have been asked to give a lot of

consideration to the ways in which student feedback is used to

inform their decision making. In addition to a strong desire to see

MACE results made public in all modules, students are also keen

to have as much information as possible from historical sources

to allow them to make choices on which modules would be best

for them. One of the central concerns was that MACE feedback

could often be reactionary. What a student feels when asked to

reflect on a difficult module as soon as they have finished it may

be very different to their reaction three years later, when they

have had time to realise that the same module was absolutely

fundamental to their learning and understanding. To quote one

Humanities student:“Taking a fast-track language module was one

of the hardest things I did at University. It was

probably twice as much work as any of my other

first year modules, but looking back on it now, I

realise that it saved me a heck of a lot of effort

in the long term and greatly enhanced my ability

to understand the subject.” 40

One solution put forward by the student focus group that was

asked to consider this issue was to involve alumni, who would be

able to give a reflective overview of their University experience.

This informed the following recommendation:

• Increased feedback from alumni should be sought to inform

module choice and help prepare new students for their

university experience.

39 See http://humanities.exeter.ac.uk/undergraduate/yourexeter/login/

40 MACE Feedback Focus Group, term 1, 2012/2013.1021

Vision for the Future of Education | CEMPS

TARGETS AND IMPACT MEASURES

The aim of the Students’ Guild is to have a positive impact on

the academic and personal experience of all students. It is our

hope that the CEMPS Students’ Vision for the Future of Education

will help achieve demonstrable change across the University,

culminating in improvements in student satisfaction surveys like

MACE and the NSS. In order to ensure progress on each and every

issue within the college Visions, the Students’ Guild will commit

the resources to both check the progress that each college is

making on a regular basis, and to supporting colleges to creatively

think about how they might meet the challenges and share best

practice through the University Student Engagement Network.

The following measures have been put in place to follow-up on

the 2013 Visions for Education, and track the progress that each

college is making in achieving their students’ goals:

• Each college will have an elected ‘College Officer,’ a student

responsible for liaising with the VP Academic Affairs and

reporting on major academic issues within the college. Part

of their responsibility will be to assess how effectively each

college is responding to their Vision.

• The VP Academic Affairs, Alex Louch, is committed to

ensuring that the recommendations set out in the Visions are

adhered too. Alex will oversee progress on the Visions, and

raise any concerns with the ADE.

• At the end of each term, Research and Representation will

produce a short report for each college, responding to how

the Visions have been addressed. This report will be student-

led, placing our Subject Chairs and College Chairs at the

forefront of quality assurance and review. These reports will

be published through departmental ELE SSLC pages, ensuring

that they are available for every interested student.

• The issues arising out of the Visions should be thematically

discussed at Student Engagement Network meetings,

allowing colleges to share best practice and support creative

solutions to the challenges posed.

Through these means, we hope to ensure that the profile of the

Visions is increased and that more students will continue to get

involved with their education in the future. Finally, we hope to see

improvements via feedback from the following sources:

• Student monitoring through SSLCs and College Chairs;

• Changes to academic misconduct data and exam satisfaction;

• NSS, MACE, and PTES results.

NUS confirmed that the Students' Guild's Teaching Awards were the largest in the UK in 2014, receiving more nominations than any other student-led Teaching Awards in the UK., distributed to 709 members of professional services and academic staff.

TEACHING AWARDSTEA

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AWA

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• Overall nominations increased by 186 to 2,601• These nominations were made by 1,518 students• The number of staff nominated this year was an incredible 709, all of

whom received a copy of their nominations

The celebratory event took place in the in the Royal Albert Memorial Museum, with staff and students mingling amongst a display of world class Exeter research.

WORLD-CLASS RESEARCHAVAILABLE TO EVERYONEHave you had an amaz ing lecture on a top ic that insp i red you?Do you th ink more people should have access to the research ofExeter ' s academic communi ty ?Research Uncovered g ives you the chance to share the research you ’repass ionate about wi th people f rom ever y background

Vis i t www.exetergui ld .com/RU to f ind out more .

NOMINATIONS OPENUNTIL 16 :00 NOV 15

Research Uncovered is a new project run by the Students' Guild Academic Representation team, as a result of a manifesto pledge by the VP Academic Affairs. The project consisted of a three stage process, combining nominations, voting and delivery, all of which saw high levels of engagement.

Initially, students were invited to submit nominations via the Students’ Guild website and in person to academic reps and the VP Academic Affairs. In just one day we received over 130 nominations for 58 separate academics.

At this stage, 1,197 votes were cast and a sense of competition developed between student groups, who were keen for their discipline to be represented. A departmental spin-off event, ‘Engineering Uncovered,’ saw five academics showcase their cutting edge research to over 100 students in one evening. Seven research projects progressed, and staff truly appreciated having been selected by students across the University.

Two talks were held in Exeter city centre at the Bikeshed Theatre, and full capacity crowds enjoyed talks on butterfly physics and being ‘used’ by technology. Local press and social media picked up on the free events in town where students and the public packed into the venue side by side.

In total, over 750 attendees were present at events across the term and engagement with online content saw 18,400 visits to the project website, with over 700 views of video highlights.

RESEARCH UNCOVERED

RU

At the start of the year, the Academic Representation system faced a significant issue. The democratic processes of representative elections had never been fully centralised or monitored in every discipline. This year we had two fully centralised elections of academic representatives each incorporating over 300 elected positions. The result is that thousands of students have voted to decide who represents them on their course, with all of Exeter’s reps now being democratically elected.

Any student could put themselves forward as a candidate through the website, with the option of submitting a photo and manifesto (see an example from Rachael Gillies, 3rd year Theology rep and incoming Guild President, below). We are very grateful for the help and support from staff in all colleges to get the elections up and running.

ACADEMIC ELECTIONS

ELECT

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HUMANITIESSOCIAL SCIENCES &INTERNATIONAL STUDIESLIFE & ENVIRONMENTAL

SCIENCESENGINEERING, MATHEMATICS

& PHYSICAL SCIENCES

EXETERGUILD.COM / ELECTIONS

A C A D E M I C

L E A D E R S

Find out the opinions of the students who you represent / represent these views at student staff liason committee meetings.Feed the outcomes of these meetings back to students / work with the students guild to ensure that good practice is shared accross the university.

NOMINATE SEP 16 - OCT 3VOTE OCT 7 - 11

A C A D E M I C

L E A D E R S

MEDICINE

DO YOUHAVE WHAT

IT TAKES?

SOCIAL SCIENCES& INTERNATIONAL

STUDIES

LIFE & ENVIRONMENTALSCIENCES

HUMANITIES

BUSINESS SCHOOL ENGINEERING, MATHS& PHYSICAL SCIENCES

NOMINATE SEP 16 - OCT 3 | VOTE OCT 7 - 11

NOMINATE SEP 16 - 26 | VOTE SEP 30 - OCT 4

MIR

ROR

The purpose of the Mirror scheme is to enable staff and students to gain an insight into each other’s daily working lives. In the context of learning and teaching it helps to foster understanding and deeper collaboration between professional services staff, academics and students.

This year, we paired 24 students with members of staff including the Vice-Chancellor, Professor Sir Steve Smith and the Deputy Vice-Chancellor for Education, Professor Janice Kay

"I think it is a great idea, and thoroughly enjoyed participating in it. Just do it!"

Prof. Sir Steve Smith, University of Exeter Vice Chancellor

MIRROR

All of these achievements have made this the most successful year for Academic Representation in Exeter’s history. We have been delighted to the win our two national awards this year.

We hope that this national recognition will provide us with an excellent platform with which to make Academic Representation at Exeter even stronger over the next year – we are only just getting started!

the National Union of Students’ ‘Academic Representation’ Award 2014

Higher Education Academy / National Union of Students Students' Union and Institution Partnership Award 2014