Welcome back everyone! As you begin to settle back into university life, I thought it would be a good time to talk about our course reps, what they do, and to reflect on what we have achieved over the last semester. 

For those that don’t already know, your course rep is a student representative whose job it is to make sure that the student voice is heard. There is 1 student rep per course, per year group, and they are elected to listen to your feedback about your course. Whether there’s something you love about your course, or there are things that could be improved, your student course rep can act as the bridge between students and university lecturers. They feed back any concerns or positives to the Student Staff Liaison Committee who meet regularly. The committee is made up of course reps from your school, some lecturers, and is co-chaired by a school convenor. It is at these meetings that course reps get the chance to voice your feedback and hopefully inspire the university to make changes to the things about your course that need to be improved. For more information on what our course reps do, click here to check out my blog post all about it. 

The most important thing about your course reps is that they use your feedback to make some extremely positive changes. Thanks to your feedback, and the work of the SSLCs, here are some of the changes that we have been able to make across various faculties over the last semester: 

SSLC’s in the Faculty of Social Science: 

* In NBS: The school and Waterstones secured an agreement meaning that first year students could swap an incorrect textbook for the correct one (which had been purchased as part of a value pack). 

* In LAW: New furniture has been secured for the common room and is arriving in January. 

* In ECO: There is a proposed educational practice & innovation committee to discuss new issues and innovations that are time-sensitive. 

SSLCs in The Faculty of Arts and Humanities: 

* In LDC: Student reps are looking to doing research about contact hours and have been talking to their students about additional costs for Dossiers. 

* In PPL: After a deadline was moved forward by a week, work of the reps got the school to put the date back to the original, for the assessment deadline. 

* In HIS: The school has been discussing with the Uni and the Students' Union about the current set up for waiting for exams outside congregation hall and how this can be improved. 

SSLCs in The Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences: 

* The School Convenor for the Nursing and Midwifery programs in HSC, Roberto Bogyere, is doing some research into Nursing students’ experience of preparation for practice. Take part in the survey by clicking here. 

* School Convenor for MED, Scott Hawkins, and I are currently doing some research into how the School of Medicine conduct Procedural Irregularity processes and the impact of this on MED students’ experiences. 

SSLCs in The Faculty of Science: 

* PHA Senior Advisor has put together items for advisers to show a breakdown of what students do in each so they can help students with the areas they don’t teach on but also be able to feed into a reference more positively. 

 

YOU can lead change! All of these improvements have been made because of the feedback that you have given. Thanks to your feedback last semester, I have also begun discussions with the university to address the problems that some of you have had with rooms and timetables. These are just a couple of examples of how your feedback has promoted a positive change to your academic environment over the past few months. Remember, one of the best ways to give feedback is through your course rep. To find out who yours is just click here. Soon you’ll be able to keep up-to-date with what your course reps and conveners are up to and to provide feedback to them by using our website. Keep an eye on the education tab for more to come. If you think that something could be improved here at UEA, or you’d love to talk to me about what you think is already great, then please do get in touch at [email protected].