HSS QAE COMMITTEE PAPER 08/03
For discussion
EUSA Course Reviewer website – update
A paper from EUSA providing an update on the Course Reviewer website is attached.
The Committee may is invited to discuss the paper.
Tom Ward
The Course Reviewer
Progress Report, November 2008
Background:
The Course Reviewer (www.eusa.ed.ac.uk/reviewer) launched during
Semester 2 of 2007/2008, as a sub-site of the Students’ Association website –
a convenient and informal means of allowing students to review their
experiences on taught courses at the University of Edinburgh.
The initial promotional campaign, running from February to May 2008,
focussed on promoting the review facility to first years and second years as a
means of ensuring that the Course Reviewer could quickly offer a viable
alternative to the paper-based Alternative Prospectus (traditionally distributed
in Freshers’ Packs as a facility to aid first years in selecting outside courses).
The long-term intention is to roll out The Course Reviewer further so as to
feature multiple reviews for all undergraduate courses and all taught
postgraduate courses. This could have a range of benefits for the student
community and for the university:
 Fostering a sense of dialogue amongst the academic community
 Aiding undergraduate and MSc students in course selection
 Encouraging students to think analytically and creatively about their
experiences at the university
 Feeding into the Quality Enhancement process
Ideally, we would want The Course Reviewer to become engrained in the
student experience, so that reviews are written and read at key times of year
quite instinctively by the student population – who recognise the website as a
useful and trusted source of peer opinion.
Relevance To The Quality Enhancement Agenda:
We think The Course Reviewer fits in well with the Quality Enhancement
agenda in that it provides an informal parallel version of the end of year
course questionnaire process. Unlike the course questionnaires, reviews are
placed where they can be read by staff and students to provide ideas on how
the university is currently teaching and how it might want to develop it’s
teaching practice in the future.
Students and student representatives often express the opinion that while
they are given course review questionnaires, they don’t know specifically what
is done with them or whether any broad themes are drawn out from them at
school or college level to be worked on by the university. The Course
Reviewer could potentially offer a more visible and accessible way to share
ideas on the courses they are studying at the university; and could allow the
Students’ Association and University staff with a means to quickly gauge and
respond to feedback from students, identifying widespread themes.
Allowing Taught Masters Students To Feed Into The Quality
Enhancement Process:
Taught Masters students are a section of the student community who often
miss the chance to feed in to student representative structures due to the
intensity of their courses, and we would hope that The Course Reviewer could
provide a very useful means of collating the experiences of taught
postgraduates at the university. We already know that taught postgraduates
have a range of different issues with teaching and support at the university –
through the Student Association’s academic casework – but up until now we
haven’t had a place to collate accounts of these experiences.
Progress
Over the launch period, 280 first year reviews were submitted for 142 different
subjects, following a number of targeted promotional activities.
This
compares to the previous year’s Alternative Prospectus favourably, which only
featured 122 reviews of 122 courses. We found that e-mail communications
provided the most instantaneous pick-up in review submissions and will
continue to use targeted emails at choice times of year and to reach different
sections of the student body.
Coverage for other undergraduate and postgraduate subjects remains
negligible as no targeted promotions have yet happened for latter year
undergraduate courses and postgraduate courses. We are about to run a
promotional email to last year’s Masters students which we hope will increase
coverage in that area; and will aim to reach the entire undergraduate
population with our promotional efforts during Semester 2 this year.
We are currently reviewing first year experiences of the website to find out
whether it has offered a suitable and popular replacement for The Alternative
Prospectus; and will be highlighting the website as the key point of student
information on course choices to key staff across the university (DoS’s;
Course Organisers; Lecturers; School Secretaries; Visitor Centre Staff) to
strengthen awareness after the initial successful launch and promote
‘signposting’ to the website by academic and administrative staff.
Challenges
The following can be seen as the major challenges now faced in developing
The Course Reviewer:
 Developing the recognisability of the brand and establishing it within
key student communications
 Increasing coverage through targeted communications at times when
students are particularly interested in reviewing their courses
 Developing tangible means of ensuring that the reviews are feeding in
to the Quality Enhancement process, through representative channels
and dialogue with the academic community.
Ideas on the development of The Course Reviewer are welcomed. We hope
it can become a valuable resource to both the Students’ Association and the
University as a whole.
Students’ Association Contacts For The Course Reviewer:
Guy Bromley – Vice President of Academic Affairs (vpaa@eusa.ed.ac.uk)
Lynn Allan – Academic Adviser (lynn.allan@eusa.ed.ac.uk )