The University of New South Wales

Notice of Meeting



A meeting of the Computer Science and Engineering Teaching Committee (CSE Teaching Committee 19/03)
will be held at 12:00pm on Friday, 07 June 2019, in Room 103 (HoS Meeting Room), Computer Science Building.

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

John Shepherd
Committee Chair

Agenda


  1. Apologies and Welcome


  2. Minutes of Previous Meeting *

    CSE Teaching Committee 19/02 (05 May 2019)


  3. Reports from Bodies outside CSE

    John Shepherd will report on any interesting/relevant devlopments that have occurred in committees, work-groups, etc. at UNSW.


  4. Special Consideration and Supp Exams

    UNSW decided, part-way through 19T1, to change how Special Considerations were handled. Rather than having a system where details of the consideration request were collected, convenors were informed and convenors made a decision on how the special consideration should be handled. UNSW, in attempting to make decision-making more unfoirm across the institution, are now making decisions and informing the students, without the Convenor's involvement on most occasions.

    Since the new strategy was introduced partway through 19T1, Student Lifecycle decided to allow courses which had given specific special-consideration schemes in their Course Outline that they could honour them in 19T1. It is not clear whether certain common practices (awarding Supps to students with a mark close to 50), will be allowed in future. We discuss whether we should have a school-wide approach to special consideration, which we can convey to Student Lifecycle.


  5. MyExperience 19T1

    Perhaps surprisingly, CSE's MyExperience numeric results in 19T1 were not seriously adversely affected by the shift to 10-week terms. However, trimesters were frequently mentioned in the comments as a source of angst. We give an overview of the results.


  6. Course Offerings 2020

    There were a few problems with the scheduling of courses in 2019. In some cases, there was not the opportunity for students to complete pre-req courses in order to take follow-on courses. There is also an imbalance between the number of offerings in T1, T2 and T3, with T3 having significantly more courses than the other two terms, and having too few ADK courses in T1. A proposed set of course offerings for 2020 needs review and discussion.

    See Proposed 2020 Course Offering.


  7. Astra

    The new Astra results management system is being rolled out across UNSW in 19T2. Astra was set up with each course have an assessment scheme that matched what was defined for the course in AIMS. Many people have found that the scheme for their course, was not what they wanted. We give and overview of Astra and consider how to best utilise Astra and minimise the effects it has on how we do our job.


  8. 3+ Course Revisions

    A common complaint from MyExperiecne 19T1 was that courses were "over-stuffed" (i.e. too much content to cover/absorb in 10 weeks). This suggests that maybe the 2x2 hours per week over 9 weeks, to give the same number of lectures hours as before, may not have been particularly successful. Should we try to tweak the content and delivery to better suit 10-week terms, or should we consider considerable course revision to (a) make courses fit better into teh 10-week time frames, (b) take the opportunites to eliminate redundancies and get courses to integrate better.


  9. Any Other Business