UCL CENTRE FOR LANGUAGES
& INTERNATIONAL EDUCATION
Course Units 2012‐2013 Teaching Committee Meeting ‐ Minutes Thursday 14 February 2013 12.00‐13.45 Central House room G.01 Chaired by Dr Christine Hoffmann Staff present
David Albury Yoko Aldous Anja Boeing Sophie Bourguignon Siqin Brown Rachel Clarke Dominic Dengler Roberto D’Onofrio Madeleine du Vivier Petra Garcia‐Rodriguez Claudia Geithner Diego Flores‐Jaime Maria‐Teresa Forteza‐Rey Luay Hasan Dr So Hiranuma Dr Christine Hoffmann Fabrice Lamotte Katrin Lessing Li‐yun Liao Mireille Michel Cathy Morand Marc‐Georges Nowicki Catherine Plant Jenny Rodgers Karine Roumetz Fabio Sastre‐Alonso Chizuko Seki‐Zdrzalka James Sinclair‐Knopp Sheryl Tait Linda Van Abel Anne‐Sophie Vandamme Selina Zheng.
1.
Welcome and apologies 1.1 Apologies given from Carmen Cabrera‐Balaguer, Juan Fernandez, Philippe Galinier, Adam Salisbury, Pierre Scordia, Genesia Spagnuolo and Cristina Testi. 1.2 Welcome given to Sheryl Tait who now assists the Course Units office with administration duties, alongside supporting the Departmental Administrator with admin for Kazakhstan and also reception work, and to Linda Van Abel who teaches our new Dutch course unit. 2.
UCL and CLIE developments 2.1 Strategic Plan: ACTION: All asked to read the CLIE Strategic Plan which is now available on the CLIE staff intranet; all are recommended to read the UCL International Strategy first, in which the CLIE features a lot, and for which ours is based on; NOTED: it may be a surprise to see mention of Interpretation in the UCL Strategy – Chair will get more information about this from the Office of International Affairs, as this is not necessarily a skill that our students will use or require. 2.2 Internal Quality Review: NOTED: Coordinators should have fed back to their teams that the IQR is taking place; Chair confirmed the date for the IQR as Monday 11 March 2013 and summarised what this has, and will involve and the following points were noted:  Members of the IQR panel will meet with academic and administration staff, and possibly also students; they will not go to classes. Chair will confirm as soon as possible exactly who they will want to speak with on 11 March; Course Units Teaching Committee Meeting 20130214 ‐ Minutes  At the last IQR it was concluded that for Course Units there are no clear guidelines in place regarding staff observations, however the Course Unit procedures on this are different to English for Academic Purposes, as we are not accredited by the British Council;  We have had to provide a lot of supporting documentation, including minutes from Board of Examiners and Teaching Committees, and to highlight, for example what we see as our weaknesses (the lack of space that we currently have was included here); everything is in order.  Brenda Cross from the Medical Faculty, who was a major part in instigating the SSCs for medical students (medically orientated course units taken by students from the medical school), is on the IQR panel, which is great as she is so familiar with what the CLIE does. 2.3 UCL Qatar: the CLIE may be involved with the setting up of a pre‐masters Archaeology course; there would be two English for Academic Purposes positions. 3. Course Units 2012‐2013 3.1 Reading and Writing examinations: NOTED:  Almost all exam papers have now been sent to the relevant Visiting Examiners;  The college deadline for receiving all papers is Friday 01 March, so we should receive papers back in the next week or so: teams may need to have one last check of papers in the last week of February, before they are sent to Registry. 3.2 Oral examinations: NOTED:  Oral exam slots for all levels/dates will be available for students to book online from Monday 25 February;  Tutors should advise their students to do this – they should not wait to receive an email telling them to book;  There will be different slots available to course units and medics students to book, e.g. they will be listed by the relevant syllabus;  If students have not booked an oral slot (for term 2) by 11 March then a slot will be booked for them; if students have not booked an oral slot (for term 3) by 08 April then a slot will be booked for them – they will receive an email to inform them of this, if they do not book a slot.  Students with orals in term 3 can choose to wait for their final exam timetable to be published before booking, but we recommend they book sooner while there is still choice available. If they have a clash with another exam, only then will we reschedule an oral exam time. ACTION: The office will send information to the Dutch tutor regarding Oral exams. 3.3 Moodle: NOTED:  Not all Course Units courses have a Moodle course yet: Sheryl Tait will now be available to assist tutors with Moodle and can request and set up new courses and update links on the courses etc.; tutors with queries regarding Moodle should email Sheryl. For course content related queries tutors should contact Ian Newby. 3.4 Projects: NOTED:  Project coversheets will be distributed to tutors next week;  We should now use Turnatin (plagiarism detection software) and could eventually add a link to Turnatin on each Moodle course page for students to submit their work directly;  Students submitting their work on Turnatin would not replace them submitting a hard copy of their work to the office, it is in addition to that and to uncover any concerns tutors may have regarding plagiarism; tutors would still receive and mark the hard‐copy of the work ACTION: As there are not currently Moodle course pages for each course/syllabus yet we should gradually introduce the use of Turnatin, with just some languages / levels this year; James Sinclair‐Knopp and Catherine Plant who both currently use the software on the English course units could explain to all (in teams) how it works. 3.5 In‐class course assessment: Chair asked for feedback from tutors on the new In‐class course assessment which has recently taken place, and the majority of feedback was regarding technical equipment and facilities for playing the listening assessment recorded text. NOTED: Course Units Teaching Committee Meeting 20130214 ‐ Minutes 
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There were technical issues, which meant some tutors had to read out the text for the listening questions; Tutors requested more CD players, and for us to check with UCL Estates and Facilities to ensure that all facilities work and also whether recordings could be put on the intranet: RESPONSE:  we could check with Estates, but this doesn’t guarantee facilities will work on the day as we do not know who is in the classroom beforehand;  we could not rely on having recordings available on the intranet as not all rooms would have internet access and there could still be technical issues;  we could buy more CD players, but that would eventually result in more being broken. ACTION:  the assessment should be reviewed by and amongst teams in the June review meetings;  to meet with the ICT office to discuss a realistic timetable with them for getting recordings ready for tutors;  we will look into the possibility of purchasing new CD players around the start of term 2. NOTED: Chair confirmed that tutors must submit one overall percentage mark to the office, which should be written on the assessment coversheet, and any decimals should be rounded up or down as necessary. In addition tutors may, if they wish to, also include the separate the marks for the Grammar and Listening skills on the cover, so students can see where their weaknesses are. Tutors can give students a breakdown of their assessment marks. 3.6 ‘Zero‐Credit’ students Chair confirmed that there have been misunderstandings about students joining UCL without the GCSE in a foreign language, who are required to study a course unit; it appears students and Departments were informed something different to us, for example they were instructed there would be no assessment: NOTED: for students taking a Course Unit for zero‐credit this year:  it is not compulsory to take the Reading and Writing exam;  tutors should still encourage them to complete the Project and the Oral examination, however if they make a case that this would impact significantly on their studies, they can be exempt;  it is not necessary to pass the course – if they fail, they can still progress;  from 2013‐2014 the requirements will all be much clearer: those students that have credit available should take a normal course unit; those that don’t have credit available should take a ‘zero‐credit’ course unit, for which assessment is not compulsory. ACTION: Language Coordinators to meet with all ‘zero‐credit’ students for their language to clarify and confirm the requirements – the Course Units office will suggest a suitable day and time for this (in the meantime if tutors are asked about this by their students, they should inform them that a meeting to confirm arrangements will take place very soon). 3.7 Resit students NOTED:  It is not compulsory for re‐sit students to attend classes, but should be encouraged to do so;  If we are approached by re‐sit students now who need to re‐do the Listening assessment from last year, we should arrange for them to do this in the last week of February (the same date as last year);  Any re‐sits that had already contacted us (before Christmas or the start of term 2) were given the Grammar and Vocabulary and/or Listening course assessment during the week that the In‐class assessment took place – or were offered the new combined In‐class assessment instead (if they needed to re‐sit both the Grammar and the Listening assessments). 4. SSCs 2012‐2013 Chair requested feedback on SSC courses (Course Units for medical students that run to a different timetable) so far; for the first year both year 1 and year 2 students have classes scheduled only in term 1, which was determined by the Medical School to allow their students to choose another medically‐related SSC in term 2. NOTED:  Most of the year 1 students appear to have requested from their tutors to have classes in term 2, so this shows that they are free in both terms;  For the year 2 students taking French, extra tutorials were given at the start of term 2 to prepare them for their exam in January: the French team requested for year 2 students to have all their assessment at the end Course Units Teaching Committee Meeting 20130214 ‐ Minutes of term 1, but all agreed that this would be too much, to take all assessment at the same time, immediately after 8 weeks of teaching. 5. Any other business 5.1 New BA: NOTED:  In order to collaborate more with the Institute of Education a proposal has been made for a new BA course to be offered by the CLIE: BA in languages which includes a post‐graduate certificate in Education, the focus on becoming a language teacher;  This would be a CLIE BA and we would deal with the languages (e.g. two languages) and the study abroad element, while the Institute of Education would offer the PG certificate and deal with the, ‘How to teach a language’. Students would be permitted to take courses in other language Departments, so these Departments would gain more ‘custom’ as a result;  We anticipate that the earliest this could be put in place would probably be 2014‐2015. 5.2 Finance and budget: Chair confirmed that, following budget meetings the CLIE has been requested by college to submit/contribute 8% more per year to college, which equates to approximately £100,000: NOTED:  This will be difficult, especially as we are forced to use Birkbeck rooms for teaching due to lack of UCL space, which currently costs the CLIE approximately £33,000 a year; in addition we face stiff competition as other colleges appear to wait until we publish our English for Academic Purposes course fees before setting their own;  We must be careful of running small classes (salaries versus income);  One suggestion might be to collaborate with SOAS (The School of Oriental and African Studies) on our Arabic, Japanese and Mandarin course units, which could allow us to run more courses in these languages in particular, higher levels. 5.3 Space: NOTED:  Chair has raised some very important issues with college regarding space at the CLIE, or lack of, e.g. the need for more offices, more storage and ideally also some sort of common room for students;  An old storage space in the basement at Bedford Way has been vacated for us to use for storage, details of this TBC;  Our lack of space should be included in the Internal Quality Report. 5.4 UCL Stratford: RAISED: the issue of whether the CLIE would have to move to the new campus at Stratford: NOTED:  Chair has not received confirmation of this however confirmed there have been discussions about whether it would be appropriate to move the CLIE, or even just the University Preparatory Certificate part of the CLIE to the Stratford Campus;  It would not be appropriate logistically to split the Department across campuses, or to move the CLIE away from Bloomsbury at all, as we are so closely linked to the rest of college. Suggestions are that it would be a more researched based campus, so if there are no undergraduate specific activities etc. there, then it would not be appropriate for our students. 5.5 UCL grading: RAISED: rumours of the UCL grading system changing to a more American style whereby, for example all students with marks that fall into the top 5% of a class would receive a grade A, regardless of their actual mark: NOTED: Chair confirmed that there had been discussions about the UCL grading system, but that nothing has been confirmed or agreed yet. Meeting closed at 13.45 Course Units Administrator +44 (0) 20 7679 5481 18 February 2013 Course Units Teaching Committee Meeting 20130214 ‐ Minutes Course Units Teaching Committee Meeting 20130214 ‐ Minutes