School of Society and Culture December Update

Hey everyone! I just wanted to update you all on everything that has been going on within the School of Society and Culture so far this year! With the school restructuring happening the drama modules have been moved to SoADA and we have now taken on the education students from PIoE! So far this term I have begun to attend meetings and meet all the lovely course reps for the school. I have taken all your feedback and have relayed this to the Faculty, below are some of the details of meetings I have attended so far!

Meetings I’ve attended

Faculty of Arts, Humanities and Business Teaching Learning and Quality Committee (TLQC) 27^th September

• This was my first meeting as the school rep
• I was welcomed by the faculty and contributed to the conversation where I felt the student's voice needed to be heard.
• We discussed
  • How to promote student representative opportunities
  • Module records and DLE (Moodle) demonstrations by lecturers
  • Course rep training and feedback sheets
  • My career – and the activities occurring for the next semester for students in FoAHB
• The main thing I took away from this meeting was how I needed to maximise my role through gathering feedback from students as this is the most important voice within the university.

Course Rep Drop-In

• This was my first chance to meet some of the amazing course reps for the school
• Although this was early in the year the course reps already had some great feedback that I have taken on, for example:
  • What references were good for each assignment on the course
  • Assignment feedback becoming more interactive
  • Robbins does not have enough charging areas for students. Some suggested that vending machines in the area would be a good idea for those who have long lectures
  • Updating rep info on the SU website – this has been seen to

Course Rep Drop-In 21^st November

• This meeting was great for feedback, I was able to collect some feedback and helped course reps create forms for feedback to send out to their peers
• Some feedback I collected at this session was:
  • Timetabling being an issue with some having super crammed timetables and others having one lecture/seminar a day
  • Period products being more accessible in buildings off of the main campus or more information on where people can get them from on campus
  • DLE layout being confusing for some as different across modules and being hard to navigate sometimes
  • Lectures not being posted before lectures (should be 48 hours before a lecture)

Faculty of Arts, Humanities and Business TLQC 27^th November

• This was my second meeting with the faculty which took place on Zoom, it went very well and I brought up feedback that I had received from course reps, including:
  • Timetabling – having back-to-back lectures and students having one lecture a day for those who live further away
    • The committee suggested that they would look into the issue of back-to-back lectures especially those that are in Emdeck and coming back onto campus
    • For those who live further away, they suggested using the campus facilities such as the library, gym, SU, etc. whilst they are on campus
  • Differences in DLE layouts across courses, modules having different layouts and people finding it confusing
    • I am following up with the SSC Associate Head of School for Education and Student Experience
• On top of this, we also discussed
  • Authentic assessment, AI, and the quality of assessments – whether using AI in assessments may be beneficial to learning and help to develop student's critical assessment skills.
  • Bookable training sessions for digital skills covering basic skills such as R Studio, Outlook, Word, etc. https://www.plymouth.ac.uk/services/digital-skills
  • Whether SPAG (spelling, punctuation, and grammar) should start to be used in the rubric for marking coursework

School Deputy Election

• The School of Society and Culture how now elected a Deputy this is Adam Smyth he is a First Year Politics with International Relations student
• Adam was voted in by his fellow course reps with more than 50% of the votes going to him.
• We have arranged an upcoming meeting so we can chat about how we can help progress the school further

Programme Committee Meetings

Course Reps will be taking part in committee meetings in the next couple of weeks. The feedback and questions for this will be posted in the next newsletter

Aims for the Upcoming Months and Next Semester

• Work with the SSC Associate Head of School for Education and Student Experience to find a way of making the DLE less confusing for courses that have brought up the layout issue
• Work with the SU to help students have the best experience throughout their time at the university
• Help course reps collect feedback from students
• Work with SSC programme leads to better coursework feedback
• Attend upcoming meetings – Annual Student Meeting, STLQC, FTLQC’s, course rep meeting