New Core Curriculum
-------------------
We've changed the core courses that all students studying a CSE
major take. CSE majors are (in alphabetic order) Bioinfomatics Engineering,
Computer Engineering, Computer Science and Software Engineering,
whether as single degrees or in combined degrees.
Currently the common core is:
* COMP1917 Computing 1 (intro to programming in C)
* COMP1927 Computing 2 (data structures and algorithms)
* COMP2911 Eng Design in Computing (o-o design, Java)
Soon it will be:
* COMP1511 Intro to Programming (in C)
* COMP1521 Computer Systems Fundamentals (c,asm,os,net,parallel)
* COMP1531 Software Engineering Fundamentals (se,db,project)
* COMP2511 O-O Design and Programming (in Java)
* COMP2521 Data Structures and Algorithms (in C)
The new courses will be rolled out progressively, starting
with COMP1511 in 17s1, then COMP1521/COMP1531/COMP2521 in 17s2,
then all courses in each semester starting from 18s1.
More details: http://webapps.cse.unsw.edu.au/cse/new/
Let me know if you're interested in teaching any of these.
New Assessment Policies
-----------------------
As part of the 2025 strategy, UNSW has just released a set
of principles/policies to drive the design/implementation
of assessment in all UNSW courses.
There is a big emphasis in the principles on tying assessments
strongly to course learning outcomes, and on providing detailed
criteria to identify various levels of achievement, and giving
details on all of this in the Course Outline. To some extent,
we've done the former in the Curriculum Mapping exercise that
you might recall from accreditation.
The policies define the notion of "assessment item" as a set
of exercises that form a assessable component of a course. An
exam is an obvious assessment item. A sequence of lab exercises
that lead to a single lab mark for the course are counted as a
single assessment item. It's less clear whether you could count
three programming assignments as a single "assignment item",
but I think that's where we'll need to go.
On the implementation, some issues that don't quite fit with
much current practice in CSE:
* no assessment item worth more than 60%
* no more than 4 assessment items per course
* centrally managed++ exams must be <= 2 hours in length
++ "centrally managed" means that the Exams Branch timetables
them and provides invigilators.
Term Planning for 18s1
UNSW has a ridiculously long lead-time for timetabling, and so
you will be asked about your course set-up for 18s1 in April 2017.
Before you can do that, of course, you need to know what course
you'll be teaching in 18s1. I've done a preliminary Teaching
Allocation for 18s1, accessible via:
http://www.cse.unsw.edu.au/~teachadmin/alloc/alloc18s1.html
What you need to consider for timetabling purposes: how many
hours lectures per week? Tutes? Labs?
Given the impending transition to 10-week trimesters in 2019,
you might also want to start thinking about how you can fit
your course into a 10-week timeframe.
The proposal is that each trimester runs for exactly 10 weeks,
with no mid-semester break and no extra week like the current
week 13; everything has to fit into the 10 weeks.
In theory, we won't lose any lecture hours; the proposal is
to do 10 x 4 lecture hours/week rather than 3 x 12 lecture hours/week.
One thing that will need to change is number of labs and
timing of assignments.
If you don't have a tute/lab in week 1, then you are limited
to 9 such classes.
Assignments will need to be scheduled so that they are all
completed by week 10 (remembering that you are covering material
slightly faster in lectures).
Education Committee Meetings
Academic Proposal Deadlines