The University of New South Wales

Minutes of Meeting



Minutes of the meeting of the Computer Science and Engineering Eeducation Committee (EdC 20/03)
held at 10:00am on Friday, 28 August 2020, under Teams.

John Shepherd
Committee Chair

Agenda


  1. Apologies and Welcome

    Present: John Shepherd (JAS) (chair), Wayne Wobcke (WW), Arcot Sowmya (AS), Helen Paik (HP), Marc Chee (MC)
    Apologies: ...
    Absent: -
    In Attendance: Tom Kunc (TK), ...
      Present / Quorum:   x / 5   (quorum 5 reached)

  2. Minutes of Previous Meeting *

    Coming soon ...


  3. Reports from Bodies outside CSE

    • FAPC: SENG COOP Industrial training courses approved and will start in 2021

    • FAPC: other courses (Robotics, AI Project, and graph databases) courses approved and will run in 2021

    • FAPC: Cyber Security – ZZEN courses were returned to be fixed; FAPC not happy with the standard of tehse proposals

    • FAPC: New academic proposal system – ECLIPS. Must now be used for all new proposal. Interfaces better with other systems than AIMS did. Details go direct to Handbook and Astra.

    • HP: The Faculty international committee is still in its early stage so not a lot of progress, but one of the goals is to improve PG international student experience by creating PG student society.

    • WW: Humanitarian Engineering Committee - activity being suspended due to travel restrictions.

    • AS: University Postgrad Re-enrolment committee - international appeal committee. Upward trend in failing PG students.

    Note: FAPC = Faculty Academic Programs Committee; JAS is school rep


  4. Developments inside CSE

    Workload Allocation (CSE-Workload-Model-2020.pdf).

    • Email with your 2020 load calculations coming soon

      AS feels feedback is important because some aspects of workload (e.g. teaching UNSW Online courses) are not captured in the model

    For Noting: EngAust and ACS Accreditation

    • CVs for all continuing academic staff required by end September
    • Course Outlines for all courses required by end September

    Upcoming Events

    • Teaching Practices Workshop, Friday 4 September, led by Matthew Sladescu
    • Convenor/Admin Induction, Thursday 3 September, led by John Shepherd
    • Tutor Training Workshop, Friday 11 September, led by Andrew Taylor

  5. Enrolments 20T3

    Enrolments seem to have held up well, despite COVID.

    • Term 3 intake: larger than expected, so no significant reduction in EFTSLs

    Enrolments in the UNSW Online courses continue to grow.

    • ZZEN9021: 200+ students
    • ZZEN9311: 150+ students

  6. Teaching Online 20T2

    20T2 was the first term with fully online courses.

    MC (COMP1511) thinks online lecturers with live chat are more effective than face-to-face lectures. More questions from students, and better interaction.

    TK (COMP1511) compared experience in T1 and T2. T2 has good response in tute attendance. Using tools like Kahoot are good to increase participation.

    WW (COMP9414) reported issues in students engaging with the lectures.


  7. Online Exams 20T2

    Online, open-web, non-invigilated exams.

    Invigilated final exams in-person on-campus are ideal. COVID makes this difficult. If we could have most students on campus, how would we deal with substantially reduced lab capacity for large classes? Currently running two sessions with corralling handles up to 600 students. Would coralling even be allowed with social distancing?

    Can we change types of questions? Programming questions are easy to copy-paste via the internet (e.g. sites like chegg.com, or even just email). AS has used critique-a-research-paper question for COMP9517; worked well, but not usfeul for many courses.

    Oral exams may be useful, but (a) don't scale, and (b) can increase pressure and stress for students and staff

    Issue will be brought up to higher management. Contract cheating will target more core and big courses.

    Long duration exams are not helpful for minimising cheating. They are helpful for dealing with time-zone differences.


  8. Design Next Courses

    DESN2000 ran for the first time in 20T2 for CompEng and SENG. Feedback?

    Project-based, with projects all being related to Sydney light-rail. Hui Wu ran the Computer Engineering stream, following as closely as possible the COMP2121 Microprocessors and Interfacing content. Alexdra Vassar ran the Software Engineering stream, as a conventional software engineering group project.


  9. Viability of Streams

    Some majors/streams/specialisations have problems with low enrolment and lack of relevant electives. Should we keep all existing streams?

    Discussion deferred.


  10. 14 → 12 → 10 → 9

    Term times have been compressed from 14 weeks to (effectively) 9 weeks.

    MC plans to make extra videos for COMP1511 covering material that doesn't fit in the 9-week lecture time-frame.

    Other possible changes (e.g. spreading core material over 6 courses, rather than 5) will be looked at after accreditation.


  11. Any Other Business