School of Computing

Student feedback

Your views on your courses are important to us. By working together we help to improve the quality of learning and teaching to the benefit of all, staff and students. If you have any concerns or have suggestions for improvement to offer, don't keep them to yourself, but let us know as soon as possible. Even if you feel that any change will be too late for you to benefit, cohorts in future years will be grateful to you. There are several ways you can give feedback.

Informal mechanisms

Most issues can be resolved immediately and are best dealt with informally in this way.

  • If it is a matter to do with a particular class or a particular module, talk to your class supervisor or a lecturer on the module.
  • Questions can be raised with staff and postgraduate supervisors in person at the class or the lecture or by email. Alternatively, you may want to meet in their office (it is often best to mail first to arrange an appointment). Staff and postgraduate web pages include email addresses and maps of office locations.
  • Some modules also provide anonymous question asking pages on the web. These are good places to consult first: your question might have been asked, and answered, already.
  • There are news groups, ukc.cs.cs1, ukc.cs.cs2 and ukc.cs.cs3, for each year group. These are particularly useful for discussing matters with other students. However, if you want a quick response from staff, it is better to mail them than to rely on their reading a news article.
  • If it is a more general matter relating to a module, you might want to speak to the module convenor, to the year director or to the Director of Studies for your programme.
  • You can also seek advice from your tutor or the department's Senior Tutor on general academic and non-academic issues. Your tutor can also talk to other staff on your behalf, where appropriate.

You can find Directors of Studies, Senior Tutor and other officers on the department's contacts page.

Formal mechanisms

The University and the department also have formal mechanisms for gathering and considering student opinion.

  • Each module team will seek feedback on the delivery of their module. Typically, questionnaires will be used but some modules may use other means. Do add any further comments you might have to a questionnaire: often free format responses are more useful than quantitative data.
    Summaries of your feedback is (must be) considered by each module team when preparing their annual report on the module. The department's Learning and Teaching Committee also takes your feedback into account when it prepares its annual monitoring report for the Faculty's Learning and Teaching Committee.
  • The department has two Staff-Student Liaison Committees, one for Computer Science undergraduates and one for Applied Computing undergraduates. Your representatives on these committees can help you directly, raise urgent matters on your behalf with the Staff-Student Liaison officer, or bring matters to the next liaison meeting (but it is better to resolve issues long before these committees meet).
  • There are student representatives on the following departmental committees:
    1. The Board of Studies for Computer Science and Applied Computing
    2. The MSc in Distributed Systems and Networks Board of Studies
    3. The MSc in Computer Science Board of Studies
    4. The departmental Learning and Teaching Committee
    and also on the Faculty's Learning and Teaching Committee, the University's Board for Learning and Teaching and Senate.
  • Exit questionnaires of students after graduation.

In summary, the function of these formal mechanisms are (i) to provide a forum for student's voices to be heard at a departmental level, (ii) to ensure that student opinion is recorded and (iii) to ensure that the loop is closed by making sure that student feedback is considered, acted upon where appropriate and that the outcome is fed back to students. We expect course teams to summarise and respond to feedback for their module (for example, on the relevant news group). Student feedback and outcomes thereof is an item on the agenda of the formal committees.

Student representatives

We encourage you to consider acting as a student representative on your Staff-Student Liaison Committee or maybe on one of the other departmental committees.

Details of the the representatives for your course and minutes of meetings can be found here.

An outline of what the job entails is here.

School of Computing, University of Kent, Canterbury, Kent, CT2 7NF

Enquiries: +44 (0)1227 824180 or contact us.

Last Updated: 11/11/2014