The following provides a summary of actions or responses to various themes from your feedback. This stems from a variety of areas such as Module Evaluation Questionnaires (MEQs) the Anonymous Dropbox or the Townhall meetings.
Category/Keyword | You Said | We Did |
Dropbox | Is the anonymous drop box actually anonymous, even though I have to sign in? | Yes. It is completely anonymous, Staff cannot see the name or student ID or e-mail of the person providing feedback. A slide demonstrating this was provided at the Townhall |
Attendance | a way to check your attendance percentage | The School is currently actively working on integrating attendance software to ensure that you can view your attendance level on the student portal. |
Facilities | Can the bathrooms be better ventilated? | All the bathrooms on campus are internal and adequately ventilated to meet building regulations. |
Facilities | There is no where to properly cook food apart from the microwaves - some multicookers bought for the university for students to be able to cook meals especially when they have to stay late. | At this point in time, we’re unable to provide any additional cooking facilities. However, we have added additional microwaves for students to use. We are looking at ways to improve our campus and will keep your suggestion for future consideration. |
Facilities | Could we have some blankets on hand in the common room and prayer room. It can get very cold in these places over the winter when the heating isn't on yet. | A number of blankets have been added to both the common room and the prayer room. |
Facilities | Can we please create a Silent study area with booths? . | Unfortunately, we’re not currently in a position to make any big changes to the desks/layout right now, but we review study spaces each summer (ahead of each new academic year) and will take this into account. We will add posters to Floor 5 to remind students it is a quiet study space, and three heaters have been added to the ground floor (behind the back of reception) for students to use. This space is usually very quiet. |
Facilities | There should be a designated space for political messaging as opposed to being plastered on the stairwells | It's better if we avoided ad hoc postering around campus, we will look into a board and explore with the student reps on the Student Voice Committee. |
Facilities | Can we have more study space? | The School has designated floor 5 as a quiet study area, in addition for 23/24 the ground floor also has a study area. Specific rooms have also been timetabled in term 3 for each cohort too. |
Facilities | Please please please can we try and protect spaces for students to work in. | If there are issues with room bookings showing incorrectly or WiFi issues, the quickest way to get this resolved is to email Helpdesk@lis.ac.uk ; this ensures that the right members of staff are informed and can work on getting this fixed as soon as possible. |
Facilities | The bathrooms could be improved with ventilation | All the bathrooms on campus are internal and adequately ventilated to meet building regulations. Unfortunately, there’s nothing further we can do. |
Freedom of Speech | Free speech of all forms should be adequately and consistently protected on campus. | A Freedom of Speech "code of practice" is in operation. If any students feel that their free speech is being curtailed, they should speak to the Registrar in the first instance and we will consider whether any incidents fall within the remit of the policy. |
Foundation/Summer School | Has LIS considered every considered running a foundation / summer programme for students from disadvantaged backgrounds or who achieved lower grades at A-Level / IB (particularly in quant)? Perhaps a bit similar to the 'Explore ID' / 'Sprint' programmes that went on back in the day? An online programme over the summer taught by LIS faculty, perhaps running part time over 6-8 weeks, could be a way to boost academic attainment in the undergraduate cohort (again - particularly in quant as I know this is a current concern) and prepare students for an intense university environment in which they will be expected to regularly speak in front an audience, communicate proactively with external policy clients, and start thinking about their career post-LIS from the get go. | This is a really good suggestion which we will explore with the Schools' team. |
Graduation | As the founding cohort of this uni, I feel like the graduation should be a celebration of more than the average graduation. I would like to have a massive celebration with lots of family and showcase the past three years. | This is our feeling too, we’re excited to unveil our plans for graduation soon, and will be involving student representatives from both the BASc and the MASc in the process. Each student can bring 2 guests for free, and we’re hoping to have extra tickets for those who would like to bring more guests – but note that the venue has a max capacity. |
Induction | Can there be more information in Founder’s Week? | As a result we increased sessions in Founder’s Week including specific sessions on Registry, focussing on signposting appeals, complaints, misconduct and assessment & degree requirements. |
Internships | MASc Internships - can the MASc have internships too? | The School is actively looking into this possibility though it cannot be implemented for the current 23/24 academic session. |
Learning Resources | Need to be able to get other learning materials/articles beyond what the School provides through Perlego or JSTOR | The School has amended its Learning Resources Plan enabling a fund of £200 for first years, £300 for second years and £400 for finalists and MASc students. The form is available here: https://forms.office.com/e/dqzUpwdbzM |
Audio transcripts | I would appreciate an audio transcript or subtitles for any media such as video and podcasts with an audio feature. Sometimes I struggle to digest what is being said. | This is something we are looking in to. In the meantime, audio transcriptions for any written work are available in the Immersive Reader on Cortex. |
Problems | I think LIS should teach at least one class on how to prioritise problems. There are so many pressing problems and we can't focus on all at once if we want to make meaningful progress. I suggest evaluating them on:
• Scale
• Solvability
• Neglectedness (this one being especially important) | Good suggestion. The current problem areas are somewhat selected by ubiquitousness, somewhat by how 'general' they are (so that they can then be subdivided into small problem statements for the student groups to explore in more detail), somewhat by how feasible it is to work with external organisations on these problems, and somewhat by faculty expertise. CG is enquiring with Ash - Head of Problems - what our policy will be for selecting new problems going forward. |
Problems 2C | Why are there so many fewer faculty contributing to the problems 2c suggested topics compared to last year? James Carney, Amelia etc. have provided no suggestions. Is this because students are not meant to attempt the same project across different years? There were some topics from last year that as I understand it weren't picked by any students, so why are these also missing? Big props to James E for persisting in his request for an LIS garden and others who have resubmitted their questions. | Amelia is on maternity leave at this time and so won't be supervising student projects. James Carney will need to prioritise MASc projects. Are there any other notable absences? |
Rooms bookings | Will it be possible to have booking schedule tablets on all the rooms (particularly 1.2, 1.3, 2.3 and 4.1 - perhaps 3.1 as well) like there currently is in the meeting room area on floor one and for perspective? They are helpful because there have been many occasions where I have booked one of the rooms on floor (1.2/1.3 or 2.3) but because there is no indication of this, the previous meeting in that room has continued on and I cannot use the room or someone has walked in whilst I am in a meeting in there. | There is not the budget for this during this academic year, but we can discuss it as we start to look at budget for AY24/25. |
Student Association | There is not enough funding for societies. As a small university with little access to other unis societies, funding for societies should be a priority. Societies aren't only necessary for the cohesion of students, but can be vital for physical and mental health, allowing students to access sports and other activities at an affordable price. Now that we no longer pay for the qm affiliation, I don't understand why there isn't more funding. Climbing is only able to offer 10 memberships, for example, for the entire university. I understand that the university subsidises some cost but we shouldn't have to pick one society, because it is all that we can afford because there isn't enough funding to go around. | Since the QM partnership has ended society funding has been doubled from £1000 per term to £2000 per term. As we grow as a university, we won't be able to cover/ subsidize the amount for all societies especially in Term 1 where lots of new societies start up. We have been working with LISSA to try and make it as fair as possible but going forward Student Exp and LISSA decided that we want societies to take a register and document what activities they run, this way we will be able to see how many events are running and how many students are attending so we can ensure budgeting is as fair as possible.
Larger societies are also going to have to start paying an amount towards memberships which the School previously covered all of as most of the budget is spent on this and doesn't allow smaller societies to grow.
This term climbing had to pay a small amount towards memberships as the largest society. |
Student Representatives | Can we please implement some kind of system to improve SVC members' accountability. Can we include some kind of contract whereby SVC members are obligated to provide a minutes / summary of their involvement in debate and what was discussed more generally in each SVC committee and main session. Feedback from SVC members has been VERY SPARSE and the workings / intentions of the university are becoming more opaque. The point here is not to blame the university out of hand; I am saying that we need some kind of obligation from SVC members to be transparent and live up to their elected role. | This was discussed at the Student Voice Committee meeting on 01/05/2024. Following any committee meeting a paragraph highlighting the main issues discussed will be drafted in collaboration with the relevant student representatives will be circulated in the 12.01 and also placed on the Student Hub. This will be highlighted for new reps at their induction in 24/25. |
Student Feedback mechanisms | Reform of townhall and SVC data collection
Democracy is crumbling. Can we have please develop a system whereby we can see what other people have submitted to the dropbox and upvote things as appropriate to indicate their importance to the student body. At the moment faculty seem reluctant to go through every dropbox comment in turn because they are sceptical some thoughts are by rogue actors. I would be very happy to get involved designing and implementing such a new system. the Townhall can then return to the rightful function of going through issues evidentially important to students, and hearing what SVC discussed in response to these thoughts rather than getting a few cherry-picked points as has become the last few townhalls.
As a suggestion of how to implement this, I am familiar with the 'congress' system used in mod development and I've seen it be very successful in suggesting iterative changes. This might enable SVC and the townhall to receive higher quality / more detailed feedback, and students will be more satisfied with the transparency of the system compared to how opaque SVC seems at the moment (others are sending suggestions as for other ways to improve the accountability and transparency of SVC representatives).
My proposed reform works like this:
1. At a certain date before the townhall, the congress begins and the new Dropbox (a digital forum) enters a 'proposal phase'. New proposals for the upcoming townhall can now be submitted and other members of the forum (other students in our case) can immediately comment on them. No voting happens at this stage. Each suggestion is a seperate thread on the forum. Everybody can see everyone else's comments. In the mod context, the submitter is identifiable (open society digital campfire, innit) but in our implementation they should probably be anonymous. Commenters should also be anonymous but with unique tags for each thread so you can tell the same person across multiple comments in the same thread.
2. At a specified date (e.g. after a week), the congress enters the counterproposal phase. Delegates may make amendments to existing proposals or respond in light of something that was proposed to suggest something else.
2. a) (Potentially applicable to us) at some point, proposals and counterproposals must get someone to endorse it who is willing to implement the changes required. This is a good way to shoot down unviable proposals but that might not be in the interest of the faculty who would rather engage at SVC and townhall level. This is not necessarily relevant to the model we would want at LIS.
3. Voting phase. After say a week of counterproposals, delegates can vote yea or nay on whether they agree with the proposal, any counterproposals, or think that things should stay as they are. Normally, when voted yea proposals are implemented the next version of the mod. In our context this would probably mean things that got voted yea go to SVC with the student seal of approval on. At the end of the voting phase, all successful proposals are put in one archive, and all failed proposals are put in another. No more comments on these posts. The forum is then cleared of clutter for the next congress. This crucially means we don't cover the same ground every townhall as we can see what students were worried about in the past.
4. (in my proposed implementation) SVC meet and discuss feedback from the forum
5. We have our townhall. We discuss important things. All is well at LIS.
6. Wait a bit, then start the Congress again the month before the next townhall. Rinse and repeat.
Side point: If people don't want to call it a townhall, I would suggest calling the townhall Congress or Forum instead. Particularly if we were to adopt aspects of this system, then the whole thing including the townhall stage becomes Congress.
| This was discussed at the Student Voice Committee meeting and currently the format of the Townhall will remain, i.e. it is a place for two way dialogue and feedback between the student body and senior staff. The anonymous dropbox will continue to be used by SVC to highlight any issues where a wider discussion on a particular topic is desired. The SVC noted that generally comments received in the dropbox and individual comments on individual topics. There are not significant numbers of responses all on the same topic. |
Surveys | Is it possible to have an ‘overall this term….’ section on the termly feedback forms please because at the moment we can only give feedback on each module, not the term holistically (e.g. workload/timings for a module may be okay on paper but in conjunction with our other modules timings of assessments etc, it is not as manageable)? | Yes, an additional question for the term as a whole can be added for feedback |
Timetabling | A full day of online classes is difficult and demotivating (Thursday for BASc 2023 students) | We are considering removing all scheduled online classes - although some students and faculty do like them and like the variety. |
Weekend opening | Can LIS open at the weekends? | At this time, we will not be extending campus hours to include weekends, as there are no staff at either LIS or X+Why who are able to provide assistance in the event of first aid incidents or emergencies. We appreciate the suggestion and aim to review this in the future. |
Word count | Can we have a discussion about standardising whether written assignments have a ±10% allowance or whether the number of words in the assignment brief is an ABSOLUTE maximum? Everybody is writing their assignments using a word processor now and so we can very easily find out exactly how many words their are in the doc. Every assignment where this is relevant, somebody in our cohort inevitably asks 'can you go over by 10% or not' and if we had consistency in our application one way or the other this wouldn't be a problem. | This will be discussed at the next Policy and Regulatory Committee meeting. |
Extensions | Discussion about the state of extensions and late penalties, how to support my cohort to submit on time: I expect this will be discussed in student voice when I submit this but would like to see if we can have a wider 'consultation of the whole' either at the townhall or another Waqas-type difficult conversation event. In my cohort, more than half of the students are entitled to unconditional 1 or 2 week extensions. Not all of them use them. The problem here is not with SSPs - I have an SSP and use it frequently. The point is that there is a glaring disparity between the educational / emotional experience of the 20% in my year who get all their assignments in on time and have never used an extension (not having to work all of the holidays, feeling on top of things), versus those who rarely submit on time and/or often use their extension allowance (working all holiday, feeling ashamed of their performance). There is also a disparity in the number of people submitting late here vs. at other unis, as per the anecdotes of those I know at Oxford, Cambridge, LSE, and UCL. These people will still have the same spread of health conditions & extenuating circumstances present at LIS. From my perspective there is confusion from the faculty on this too. As Carl once put it, in his day you ‘put your essay in the pigeon hole before the deadline or you got 0’. Nobody was late. Health conditions are better diagnosed now and so we are more informed about what we should make allowances for, but the situation we’re in today still doesn’t seem ideal. Such a large percentage of the cohort being unable to submit on time has led to unmerited collective shame. There is no way that 80% of the people in my year are fundamentally unable to work to deadlines. Either LIS picked the wrong candidates (unlikely), the degree is too hard (raw grades would suggest otherwise), or the culture surrounding the degree is inhibiting. There is no insinuation here about zoomers vs. boomers etc. I simply wish to ask: what are the conditions we can create to get more of the cohort to submit on time? Things at present are unpleasant for everyone. Nobody wants to be working on assignments weeks after the deadline, it's embarrassing. Those who submit on time are such a marginal group we lack the camaraderie of a cohort working on difficult assignments together. Faculty don't want to delay feedback or be marking later than planned. We only ever have a sense of assignment camaraderie during group work. I would like to raise as a particular point of discussion as to why group work is handed in late much less frequently. I would like to see if there is some way we can imbue that collective psychology into other assignments that we submit. I would like to hear from Anson as pastoral lead, Alisha, and the experiences of Carl, Mattia, etc. We at LIS need to avoid beating around the bush and instead apply LIS's problem solving praxis* consistently, even to our own problems! | The assessment strategy is constantly being revised and there is a good progression rate at LIS.
If there are individual concerns about assessments, then students can request an extension or extenuating circumstances for valid reasons. Our policy and the reasons for a valid extension and EC claim are closely aligned with other UK higher education institutions (HEIs).
The scheduling of deadlines is also regularly scrutinised. If students are worried about inclusivity they can discuss with their EDIC student Representative who could raise the issue at EDIC.
Also in common with other UK HEIs is the provision of a reasonable adjustment for those with a disability, learning difference or complex health needs where this has been independently evidenced. These are for different reasons to an extension or extenuating circumstance. |
Contribution of module to degree and difficulty | I think there should be more space to reflect the difficulty of a module in your overall mark. For example, I think where the average mark for a module is 50, it should count more than one where the average is 70. Because I not all modules are created equal! | The mean marks for a module are discussed both internally as part of the moderation process and with our external examiners. There are processes in place that allow for some recalibrations of the scales if statistically significant differences are noted. So far this hasn't happened yet. |