CSE Teaching Committee, Minutes of Meeting, Friday 26 Feb 2010

The meeting commenced at 2:10

Present: John Shepherd (chair), Eric Martin, Bruno Gaeta, Sri Parameswaran, Arthur Ramer (scribe), Oliver Diessel, Will Uther, Sebastian Maneth, Adam Brimo, Alan Blair (later), Malcolm Ryan (later).

Apologies: Jingling Xue, Wayne Wobcke, Paul Compton.

1. Minutes of the last meeting (December 2009) were approved by voice vote.

2. Actions following from the last Minutes:

   • None were reported. Since there were many actions flagged, they need to be progressed soon.

   • Comments following from consideration of minutes:

     • BG: need to keep in mind the accreditation deadlines
     • JAS: it will happen March/April 2011; need to finalise all program changes asap
     • general (light) discussion of the rationale behind the accreditation process

3. JAS reported on academic matters:

   • Eng Aust (accreditation body) is looking for the number of registered engineers and for `engineering practice' evidence
   • David Clements (Assoc Dean Academic) proposes merging faculty undergraduate and postgraduate education committees into one
   • the University (with assistance from CSE) has developed an on-line system for managing academic proposals; it will be operational from Week 1 10s1

4. New course proposal (Web Data Compression and Search) presented by Sebastian Maneth:

   • Objectives - teach methods for *exact* search and compression, not the approximate schemes that already included in other courses
   • Comment - on the course extent, and on mathematical prerequisites - some can be presented in the course itself
   • Profile of students - both undergrad and postgrad; general discussion on possible hybrid classification and course code
   • Resources - taught out of NICTA, minimal impact on the CSE resources

   Proposal approved by voice vote.

5. Other Business:

   • BG: Number of units of credit for theses needs to be addressed
     This point follows from SK's report on 4th-year theses; the option of an "extended" thesis, for more credit units, in increments of 6UC has been flagged within the Faculty.

   • A new course in Management and Ethics in Computing had been flagged for development.

     Action: Wayne to report on progress towards development of new course at next TC meeting

   • Adam Brimo suggested that there was a need to consider changes to the SENG workshops.

     Action: Adam will discuss rationale and proposed changes with KR

   • CATEI: general discussion around the lack of response by students last semester; it was noted that the surveys had closed before the exams in 09s2, whereas in previous semesters they had remained open until after the exams; there was consensus that the surveys should close before exams commence, and we need to encourage students more to fill them out.