CSE Teaching Committee, Minutes of Meeting, 22 September 2006


The meeting commenced at 2.05pm.

Present: John Shepherd (chair), Richard Buckland, Kai Engelhart, Ansgar Fehnker, Bruno Gaeta, Michael Lake, Tim Lambert (until 3pm), Eric Martin, Morri Pagnucco (from 3:15pm), Helen Paik, Sri Parameswaran (from 4pm), Iva Peneva, Ken Robinson (until 3pm), Malcolm Ryan, Rupert Shuttleworth, Bill Wilson

Apologies: Hossam ElGindy, Jingling Xue


  1. Previous minutes and issues arising from them - John Shepherd

    The minutes of the previous meeting have not yet been prepared.

    However, all of the proposals passed at that meeting have progressed through the Faculty-level committees (which means that most of them are now officially approved; the exception being the Software Engineering program revisions which have to go to the Academic Board).

  2. Revision of MCIT and GradDipCIT - Eric Martin

    Eric noted that the ACS had only conditionally approved our postgraduate re-training programs, the condition being that we were required to introduce some ethics/management/professional-studies into the core of the programs. (The MIT program is not affected, since enrolment in it requires a four-year undergraduate IT degree, where it is assumed that the above material is covered). The proposal was to revise the two re-training programs (MCIT and GradDipCIT) to include GBAT9101 as a core course in Group A (foundation courses). The course is offered as part of the MBT program, is well-regarded, and the LIC has agreed that our students can enrol.

    Action: Eric to prepare a complete program revision for Faculty PGEC.

  3. Revision of Internetworking Plan in Masters Programs - Chun Tung Chou

    Chun Tung outlined the new courses introduced for the Internetworking Plan and talked about an upcoming proposal for a Masters in Wireless Networking.

    Action: Chun Tung to prepare a complete program revision for Faculty PGEC.

  4. Revision of COMP4141 - Kai Engelhart

    The gist of this proposal: CSE students should have the chance to be exposed to theory of computation, and it's not available anywhere at UNSW at the moment; Kai has adjust the syllabus and assumed knowledge content to make it more accessible to a wider range of students. The plan is to eventually move it to a Level-3 slot (e.g. COMP3xxx)

    Action: The proposal was accepted. Kai to prepare full proposal for next faculty UGEC.

  5. Revision of COMP4431 - Malcolm Ryan

    Malcolm outlined some issues with the first offering of the course (e.g. lack of participation by COFA students who were supposed to be enrolled but didn't). The proposal is to reduce the technical programming ("game implementation") aspects and focus more on the process of developing effective games (game-play aspects, etc.). It would be useful to get participation from non-CSE students as well, to provide an alternative perspective, and so there will be separate quotas for CSE/nonCSE students. Malcolm proposed a take-home essay for the exam; Ken suggested an oral exam.

    Action: The proposal was accepted. Malcolm to prepare full proposal for next faculty UGEC.

  6. Revision of BINF2001 - Bruno Gaeta

    This proposal is similar to the recent BINF1001 change. The aim is to open up the course to students other than BINF. This requires tweaking the biological sciences pre-reqs a little, but no change to the CSE assumed knowledge (and thus no change to the computing content). The changes lead to the possibility of taking BINF1001 and BINF2001 together.

    Action: The proposal was accepted. Bruno to prepare full proposal for next faculty UGEC.

  7. Report on first run of COMP1911 - Richard Buckland

    Richard Buckland reported on how the initial offering of COMP1911 in 06s1 went. He noted that the overall satisfaction level was reasonably high, but that there was enough dissatisfaction among several groups of students, which meant that they might not consider further study in CSE courses. Specifically: motivated students, typically with some programming background, who were frustrated by the slow pace of the material; unmotivated students (typically non-CSE-majors with no prior programming experience) who found the pace to fast and the workload too high. The "expressive level" of C (down near the machine) is a contributing factor; should we continue with C in COMP1911? There was also an impact on ENGG1000, which taught design using Haskell; some students were overwhelmed by the use of a second language. Suggest that we use a single language across COMP1911 and ENGG1000 in 2007. There is a little more information in the Post-mortem notes on the COMP1911 Wiki.

    Action: need to reconsider design on COMP1911, ENGG1000, COMP1921 for 2007.

  8. Absence of courses using .NET - Rupert Shuttleworth

    Rupert Shuttleworth put the case for having some .NET content in CSE courses, and showed that there was reasonable demand among students for such material to be incorporated. The primary reason appears to be that .NET is in demand in industry and it would benefit students to have some exposure in their courses. Helen Paik said that they were already planning to allow students to use .NET as an alternative to J2EE for project work in COMP9322. There was also a suggestion that some .NET material could take the place of the C content of COMP2041.

  9. Removal of COMP2111/COMP3111 as prerequisites for COMP3141? - Rupert Shuttleworth

    There appears to be unanimous agreement that the stated pre-requisite (COMP2111 or COMP3111) is not useful for COMP3141. Some discussion followed on the content of COMP3141 and its relationship to other courses, particularly COMP2041. It was suggested that COMP3141 was something like an extension of the material in COMP2041. However, making COMP2041 a pre-requisite for COMP3141 would exclude some students (SENG students in combined degrees) from taking COMP3141 (which is core for their program). Do we need to consider the relationship between COMP2041 and COMP3141 further?

    Action: Take a course revsion for COMP3141 to the next Faculty UGEC.

  10. Release of CEQ Evaluation for Individual Courses - Bill Wilson

    In response to earlier (in the day) queries from Student Reps, Bill Wilson pointed out the clause (26(g)) in the UNSW Academic Enterprise Agreement stating that course evaluations could not be placed on a UNSW website if they described the performance of an individual academic. Some discussion followed on how student Reps could obtain feedback on courses. Morri mentioned that at other Unis students ran their own evaluations. There was also discussion about the kind of feedback that students wanted. It was also pointed out that the CSE CEQs are collected so that indidivual academics can improve their teaching and for promotion. Evaluations for this are different to evaluations that might discuss why students would or would not want to take a particular course. Rupert (and his COMP3111 group) are working on a system to collect data that is relevant for students.

  11. Follow-up on Accreditation - John Shepherd

    John Shepherd mentioned that the questions that he had not felt comfortable answering in the accreditation meetings was ``Who in CSE takes responsibility for overseeing X'', where X was ``curriculum development'', or ``integration of graduate attributes into programs'', etc. There was a small amount of further discussion on accreditation, but no specific matters arose.

  12. Learning/Teaching Performance and Funding - John Shepherd

    John Shepherd tabled the performance indicators for Learning/Teaching that UNSW will be using as a basis for allocating a share of funds from 2007 on. Richard Buckland suggested that ``the share'' was only 5% of funding. Some discussion on adhering to the UNSW CATEI process (course evaluations) followed. It was decided that there needed to be a well-defined policy on (a) administering CATEI surveys, and (b) ensuring that the completed surveys were returned securely for processing. Richard suggested that the LIC could get a student to assist in returning the forms to the School Office.

    Action: JAS to prepare guidelines for 06s2 CATEI evaluations.


The meeting closed at 4.15pm.

School of Computer Science & Engineering
The University of New South Wales
Sydney 2052, AUSTRALIA
Phone: +61 2 9385 6876

Last updated: