Dear all,

I am feeling very battered and bruised after yesterday (I must get it in my head that playing on gravel is not the same as playing on nice soft muddy grass), but I thought it worthwhile dropping everyone a line while everything from feedback day was still fresh in our minds.

Thank you to everyone who contributed yesterday, there were a lot of useful points raised and I thikn it was well worthwhile having the feedback day.

There was however a downside with the format. It was perhaps unfortunate that:

1) The concept that we agreed at the OKTR that we would like an overview of how things fitted together (horizontal and vertical integration of courses into a coherent whole) or not was not passed on to the students who were presenting - thanks to the 3rd year students for putting together their last slide at very short notice.

2) That the international MSc students were not invited to contribute.

3) That there were no presentations on a number of new courses that ran for the first time this year, protein production and analysis, systems biology, bioinformatics and the modified introduction to biocomputing.

4) That there was so little time for discussion of the points raised, including a longer discussion on the important and interesting points raised by the "final year" students on what we should be doing - how many of those things are we actually doing already?

To try to solve the issue relating to point 4 I think that we should try to continue some of the discussion by email, we have the bklist and histoni mailing lists which should between them reach all of the students and staff. I would suggest the following should at least be discussed:

i) Course convenors are supposed to produce an annual evaluation of their course, including detailing what changes they will make for the following year in response to written and oral feedback and their own perceptions of how the course worked. In previous years these have been circulated amongst a small group of people. Perhaps this year these could be circulated on the bklist and histoni mailing lists so everyone can see. Since many of the staff do not know the new courses well and since we need to do an evaluation of the whole BSc it would also be useful if these included a little bit of background material - what the course covers, how it is taught, how it is assessed, the weighting of the marks, mark schemes used etc. This need not be an epic, just enough so that everyone can follow. I know time is short, but perhaps these could be done before the end of May. Then these would be open to discussion. I would also like a HARD copy of ALL handouts from every course please. This is in part to help with the overall evaluation of the BSc, but once I have done this these will be placed centrally so that all teachers can see what is taught on individual courses.

Ii) More discussion on coherency and integration across the degree. There were a couple of issues relating to timing of courses raised yesterday so to get the ball rolling I will draft something by Tuesday next week explaining the current timing and why it is that way and trying to lay out possible alternatives.

Iii) More discussion on the points raised by the "final year" students - how many of those things are we actually doing already?

Iv) I think it would be useful if the 3 powerpoint presentations used yesterday could be circulated

V) More discussion on issues relating to retention rates. There was clearly a major problem with the current 3rd year being Guinea Pigs for the whole system and as was mentioned a few times yesterday many of these problems e.g. the mess of the 2nd year Spring timetable, have been sorted out. We cannot do anything about the increased loss to the medical campus, we also can do very little about the other departments in the faculty changing the timing of when their students do our courses to minimise transfer to us, but can we do anything else? To contextualise this problem our retention rates by the end of 2nd year are of the order of 65-70% and allowing for the increased loss ot medical and decreased transfer in this is probably only 1 or 2 students more being lost in the new system than in the old who we might have kept i.e. it is very small numbers. Loss at the BSc-MSc interface is again something we can do little about since we set up the timetable to allow students to have this flexibility and we should encourage them to do the MSc most appropraite to their future career aspirations. What we can perhaps do are i) Flow of information about what is in our MSc degrees - Jari has already posted optino-opas for next year and we will timetable meetings at the start of the 2nd and 3rd year from next year; ii) Have presentations by all of the group leaders to the 3rd year students (in Autumn) to show the research we do in the department. This would also be useful for the students for considering where to go for the "integration into research groups" course.

Vi) Anything and everything else

Same thing for this discussion as for the feedback day, please make critisism constructive rather than destructive.

Very best wishes,

Lloyd