Case Study M: Developing a Cost-Neutral Tracker of Student Workload Distribution

As programme director for the BE degree in Biomedical Engineering I arrange a feedback meeting every semester with the Biomedical Engineering Class Representatives (from all four years of our programme). The purpose of the meeting is for the Class Representatives to alert staff to general issues relating to the programme that affect a significant number of students. It is not a forum for Class Representatives to express personal opinions; rather they are asked to meet with colleagues one week before the meeting and to compile a list of issues that are of general relevance. (It should be noted that we also have a number of additional feedback mechanisms (e.g. anonymous online module surveys) where all students can individually express personal opinions and provide individual feedback). A recurring complaint every semester was that setting of deadlines for submission of lab report and continuous assessment material was not coordinated at an inter-module level. This commonly resulted in the following issues: • Students are faced with several simultaneous deadlines; • Lab report deadlines tend to cluster towards the end of semester. This is particularly problematic in Semester II of 4th year, with the submission deadline for the capstone Final Year Project being set for the final day of the semester. In our programme every 5 ECTS module is carefully designed to require 100-120 hours of student effort (including lectures, labs, tutorials, report preparation and exam study). However, if several deadlines for deliverables (lab reports, tutorial problem sheets, design calculations) occur simultaneously students will simply not be able to dedicate the require number of hours to each module. As Programme Director I set out to develop a solution to this problem in the 2014-2015 academic year.