Recently we held our first Rep Forum of the academic year!  Rep forums have been introduced this year to help you guys feel more part of an academic learning community.

When I took up the role, I noticed that man reps struggled to find other reps to communicate with or were a bit stuck with knowing how to communicate issues to each other and find out what other students were thinking. The Rep Forum was started to help our reps communicate with each other, talk about ‘hot topics’ and also provide a space where we can share quick wins and celebrate the work our reps do for students and their views.

This time we had Eve from the Vice-Chancellor’s office come to talk about timetabling. For our first Rep Forum I was really impressed with the group that we had. Over 25 course reps came along and confidently shared their experiences about the timetabling system and feed into discussions about how they might want to change it in the future.

We then had an opportunity to break down into different faculties and have conversations about what was happening in each. There were lots of really interesting conversations including the quality of teaching, amount of teaching, timetabling of events in different places and recording lectures. I also had the opportunity to brief our reps on what was happening around lecture capture and how it is going to be enrolled onto Campus as we head into the new year.

Next time we have members from the new Embedded Wellbeing team and the Academic Director for Taught Programmes coming to talk about wellbeing and assessments. These are two really ‘hot topics’ on campus and were common amongst our reps during training so we are encouraging reps to come along to this on the Wednesday  4^th December from 12pm-1.30pm. This will be an opportunity to meet some of the new team and to talk about wellbeing and what students want to see on campus. There is also an opportunity for reps to come along and talk about what is good assessment, what types of assessment students would like to see on their modules.

As an officer, it is really exciting to see so many our reps coming forward and raising student issues to help better our campus and university life. My job is made much more effective if students are also contributing their thoughts, feelings and lived experiences to the staff that make things happen on campus. I am very proud of all our reps and thank them for supporting us as Officers through attending Rep Forums and feeding into the wider conversations.

  

Lots of love, 

Callum X