The University of New South Wales

Minutes of Meeting



Minutes of the meeting (CSE Teaching Committee 15/5) of the Computer Science and Engineering Teaching Committee
held at 1:00pm on Friday, 25 September 2015, in Room 103 (HoS Meeting Room), Computer Science Building.

Enquiries concerning these minutes should be directed to John Shepherd, extension +61293856494, jas@cse.unsw.edu.au.

John Shepherd
Committee Chair

Present: John Shepherd (chair), Richard Buckland, Bruno Gaeta, Eric Martin, Helen Paik
Apologies: Alan Blair, Annie Guo, Maurice Pagnucco, Oliver Tan, Hui Wu
Absent: Fethi Rabhi (SSP), Jingling Xue (SSP), Cassandra Nock (seconded)
In Attendance: Andrew Taylor
  Present / Quorum:   5 / 7   (quorum not reached)

  • Apologies and Welcome

    Meeting commenced at 1:15pm.

    Apologies received from: Annie Guo, Alan Blair, Oliver Tan, Maurice Pagnucco, Hui Wu


  • Minutes of Previous Meeting

    CSE Teaching Committee 15/5 (31 July 2015)

    Cannot approve, since quorum not reached.


  • Reports from Committees outside CSE

    John Shepherd had nothing to report, since he had missed the last Engineering Programs Committee meeting while attending the CSE Planning Day.

    Richard Buckland reported on discussions from Academic Board and elsewhere on the White Paper. UNSW is keen to make UNSW courses visible via the web. Trimesters are happening, but need to work out details (e.g. length, when). One of the touted benefits is flexibility (e.g. to take courses in all three trimesters). There is no evidence that students are actually interested in doing this. Also, if this happens, it will lead to a need for extra offerings of courses. There is also emphasis on outcomes and graduate attributes. And discussion about aligning our terms with northern hemisphere. Also, discussion about current funding issues (most funding from teaching; research is subsidised), and future trends.


  • New Course Proposal: Cyber Security

    Richard Buckland reported that CBA is interested in providing funding to mount Cyber Security courses. CBA staff are very interested in contributing. Plan is to have five cyber security courses (incl. existing ones), starting next year. The plan is to hire a full-time Cyber Security teaching position in order to realise this. Need to be careful that scholarly component of courses is clear; not just hacking. Courses include: Forensics and Response, Web Vulnerabilities and Pen Testing. Organising people to teach all of these courses for next year is problematic, but possible


  • 4th-Year Thesis Assessment and Showcase

    Helen Paik reported on the changes to thesis assessment introduced to fit with the recently ratified Faculty policy. Thesis B now has three assessment components: Thesis Report (80%), Demo (15%), Summary Presentation (5%). Presentation can consist of e.g. a poster, an abstract, etc., and will be submitted in PDF format and archived within CSE. Need assistance from academic staff (supervisors) in setting up the Showcase. There was discussion on when the Demo and Presentation should be held


  • Accreditation and Curriculum Mapping

    John Shepherd noted that few people had submitted sample exams, but this was needed by December. He also demonstrated the Curriculum Mapping system (CMAP) that the Faculty will be using to provide data to Engineers Australia as part of accreditation. People need to enter: Assessments, Learning Outcomes, Mapping between Assessments to Learning Outcomes, Mapping between Learning Outcomes to EngAust Graduate Competencies. Bruno noted that Bioinformatics had many courses from faculties outside Engineering which would also need to be curriculum mapped.


  • Elite Students Streams

    The Student Office have indicated that they would like to introduce separate streams for students enrolled in the Elite Students program. This would (a) give them some "formal" recognition for being in the Elite Students program, (b) make it easier for the Student Office to isolate the myriad variations that Elite students make from the regular stream.

    Follow up: we emailed SAS to ask them whether this was a useful strategy. They are not convinced that a separate stream is necessary. Discussion is ongoing.


  • A Revised Computer Science Program?

    John Shepherd reported on some discussion from the CSE Planning Day where it was noted that some current Honours students are having problems due to the recent change to Honours that made it a separate degree (rather than being a stream under 3978). Students who took many advanced courses (level-4) during their regular degree now find that there are not enough other level-4 courses to study to fulfil the requirements of the separate Honours program (previously, they could spread the advanced courses across years 3 and 4).

    It was suggested at the planning Day that converting Computer Science into a 4-year degree could solve this problem. It is not clear that this is a good idea, given that CS, in its current 3-year form, is our most popular degree. Making it a 4-year degree may cost enrolments. Another possibility is to adopt the approach that the Engineering degrees do, which is to have a separate 3-year degree that you can "downgrade" into if you don't want to (or are deemed unsuitable) continue on to the 4th year. The ensuing discussion tended to favour retaining the 3-year degree and giving better course advice, and possibly offering more advanced courses.


  • Progressing the Core Syllabus Revision

    John Shepherd noted that the Core Syllabus revision is still on hold pending the university giving more details on the trimester approach to scheduling.


  • Any Other Business

    Andrew Taylor noted that CSE now runs an instance of Git (GitLab) that can be used for courses. Students can be allocated to groups, with each group having its own repositories which are also accessible to the LiC. This looks like an attractive approach for assignment development and submission in many courses.


  • Ending

    Meeting concluded at 2:25pm