MANCHESTER

           1824

School of Computer Science

Weekly Newsletter

23 August 2010

Contents

News from HoS

This Week

School Events

External Events

Funding Opps

Prize & Award Opps

Research Awards

Staff News

Vacancies

 

Links

News Submissions

Newsletter Archive

School Strategy

School Intranet

School Seminars

ESNW Seminars

NaCTeM Seminars

 

News from Head of School

National Student Survey

The National Student Survey (NSS) is a highly visible national survey of student satisfaction, carried out annually with final year undergraduates. The headline figure that indicates if students were satisfied overall with their experience has increased for the school from 73% in 2009 to 88% in 2010. This is a very positive result, and reflects well on the contributions of student-facing teaching and administrative staff. Further details are available from:

 

http://www.campus.manchester.ac.uk/planningsupportoffice/PSO/MI/StudentFeedback/

 

There will be some further reflection on the results to the more specific questions in the survey in due course, as there are still areas in which we are receiving low scores, and we need to continue to seek to ensure that we are travelling in the right direction.

 

There are two clouds behind the silver lining. In Computer Science, the subject classification overall satisfaction score for the university has only increased from 80% to 81%; this means that the school is now out-performing other schools in the university that teach computing related topics, and that our marked improvement will not be especially visible externally. At a university level, the overall satisfaction score has only increased from 77% in 2009 to 79% in 2010, which is not good nationally.

Staff Expenses Claims Process

Various changes are being made to the staff expenses claim process, with a view to reducing the period from submissions of claims to payments.  These changes will separate the payment of expenses from salaries, allowing expense payment runs to take place every week.

 

Research Awards

SSI: The UK Software Sustainability Institute

Funder: EPSRC
PI: Carole Goble
Award Amount: £643231