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Controversial Restructure in the Life Sciences Department at Imperial College

A controversial restructure is currently underway in the Life Sciences Department at Imperial College. Further details and information sources are given later in this post.

In summary, 14 members of academic staff have been made redundant, and others have accepted early retirement. Many of these staff members perform very important roles in teaching and administration within the department, as detailed later.

The 14 members of staff being made redundant represent 15% of the teaching staff in the department. The staff who will be lost contribute 25% of the face-to-face teaching hours within the department. They also convene 33% of final year courses.

The review of their roles concentrated on their research activity and did not take into account their contribution to teaching.

Students and staff are concerned that the teaching in the department will suffer as a result of the proposed restructure. The department will conduct a review of teaching, but only after the restructure has been finalised.

The Imperial College Student Union are taking a paper to the College Senate on Wednesday 15th December asking that the proposed redundancies are put on hold until after the review of teaching has taken place, i.e. they are asking that teaching and research should be given equal consideration in the restructure. This seems fair given that the department's income is derived equally from teaching and research.

If you are concerned about the quality of education at Imperial College and would like to support the students in their opposition to the restructure you can:
Further info...

Academics under threat

Teaching responsibilities

Dr Simon Archer

Director of Undergraduate Studies (Biology)
Joint Head of the Biomedical Science Degree Programme

Dr Gerard Bishop

Postgraduate Tutor (Biology)
Convenor of final year course, Advanced Topics in Plant Molecular Biology

Dr Robert Coutts

Convenor of final year course, Molecular Plant-Microbe Interactions
Organiser of final year projects (Biology)

Dr Mahendra Deonarain

Admissions Tutor (Biochemistry)
Convenor of final year course, Biotechnology & Business

Dr Bart Feys

Admissions Tutor (Biology)

Dr Alex Grabov

Organiser of second year tutored dissertations (Biology)

Dr David Hartley

Senior Tutor (Biochemistry)
Convenor of first year course, Molecular Biology
Convenor of final year course, Molecular Basis of Development

Dr Richard Murphy

Careers Adviser (Biology)
Year in Industry Coordinator (Biology)
Convenor of final year course, Environmental and Industrial Microbiology

Dr Kevin O'Hare

Research Abroad Co-ordinator (Biochemistry)
Convenor of final year course, Genetics and Genomics

Dr Glen Powell

Convenor of final year course, Animal Behaviour

Dr John Rossiter*

Senior Tutor (Biology)
Convenor of final year course, Plant Biotechnology and Sustainability

Dr Jane Saffell

Departmental Educational Development Coordinator
Convenor of final year course, Cellular Neuroscience

Dr John Tippins

Director of Undergraduate Studies (Biochemistry)
Convenor of first year course, Biological Chemistry
Convenor of final year course, Biochemical Pharmacology & Drug Action
Organiser of final year projects (Biochemistry)

Dr Yuri Ushkaryov

Organiser, MRes in Biochemical Research
Convenor of final year course, Molecular Neurobiology

Dr Rudiger Woscholski

Organiser, MRes in Biomedical physical chemistry
Organiser, MRes in Chemical Biology in Health and Disease


* Dr John Rossiter will take early retirement
I have compiled this table myself, and apologise if there are any errors or omissions.

The Imperial College Student Union:

Felix (Imperial College student newspaper):
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The Live! CGCU student news site:

The Department of Life Sciences:
http://workspace.imperial.ac.uk/college/Public/LifeSciencesmeeting8-12-10slides.pdf (Slides shown by Professor Ian Owens at the above meeting)

Facebook:

Concern about the restructure has been voiced in The Student Room:

iPhone photo examples

The iPhone4 with iOS 4.1 includes a camera setting of HDR, which stands for high dynamic range.

This does not produce exceptional, surreal images, but they are often slightly better than the normal version.

The phone stores both versions, so you can choose which to keep.

Here are a couple of examples:

(download)

Using captured data to improve teaching and learning

Click here to download:
Ass&FbPoster.pdf (1.86 MB)
(download)

Here is my draft poster for Imperial’s Education Day.

It is produced from my Prezi, thanks to the new Prezi print feature.

I still haven’t really settled on a title.

Any feedback or comments welcome.

Online submissions in a face-to-face course

Tim Hunt graphically answered the question “When do students submit their online tests?” on his blog.

http://tjhunt.blogspot.com/2010/03/when-do-students-submit-their-online.html

Here is the equivalent data from this term’s online submissions on our first year biology course at Imperial College.

This is a face-to-face course and students are required to hand in their assignments in hard copy and electronically, usually with a  14:00 deadline.

Very few of our students hand in their work early!

Image001

Twitterfall for virtual conference attendance

Today I virtually attended an unconference at the University of Leicester using Twitter and the #uollts hashtag to filter tweets.

The conference organiser, @stujohnson , displayed tweets containing this hashtag in the room using http://twitterfall.com.

I initially tried following the conference in Tweetdeck with a filter on the hashtag, but then found that Twitterfall was faster in updating, and you can also login and respond directly from the Twitterfall page.

The only improvement that I would like to see is automatic insertion of the hashtag into posts which are in reply to a post including that hashtag.  (I think I’ve seen it somewhere, but can’t remember where.)

Thanks to all attendees, real and virtual, for a very stimulating discussion. I have lots of ideas to follow up, which is the sign of a good conference.

Final Year Options - a form with validation and an off-label use of autograding

You really have to download the Excel file to see this in action.

Click here to download:
BMSY3options2009final.xls (39 KB)
(download)

Here is our final year options form for Biomedical Science students. This course is run jointly by the Department of Life Sciences and the Faculty of Medicine, with options available across multiple degree streams.

The options available are complex and the form includes validation so that the students can only select permitted choices.

The completed forms are uploaded by the students into our VLE and then our autograding script is used to extract the data from each form into a single spreadsheet, which can be used to make the allocation.



eLearning Update, May 2009

My contributions to the recent college eLearning Day – Today’s Technologies for Teaching and Learning – were:

  • Demonstration of live streaming using Live Meeting This involved streaming and receiving in the same lecture theatre with negligible lag and a contribution from a colleague streaming from the SAF Building
  • Display of lecture recording/podcasting poster This reports on initial use of the nine lecture recordings that were made last term using Live Meeting and Camtasia. Monitoring of use will continue into the pre-exam revision period, when we expect there may be an increase in uptake, and consultation with the students continues.
  • Examples of lecture recordings and video snippets shown on a laptop PC and an iPod Touch. These can be viewed online at: https://dl.getdropbox.com/u/168456/demo.html We have now completed seven video snippets – short videos giving an overview of key biological processes or practical techniques – and will also monitor use of these via Blackboard. The snippets range from animations on cell signalling to a demonstration of the calculator that students use in exams. Two further snippets are in production on the use of microscopes and Gilson pipettes.
  • A rolling presentation entitled “Joined up teaching and learning in Life Sciences”; this gives an overview of our use of Blackboard and related technologies to improve the learning experience of our students
  • Display of our Autograding poster.

All the supporting documents from the eLearning Day are available on the CED Website at http://www3.imperial.ac.uk/edudev/cedworkshops/ltworkshops/elearninggeneral

We are planning a revision of the Statistics and Computing in Biology course which will involve:

  • Stats – lectures will be given as normal next year and we will stream and record these and then subsequently edit/add material as necessary and release as snippets. We expect that these will be useful for subsequent courses and final year projects.
  • Computing – the current scheme of lectures and separate lab sessions will be replaced with a self-guided online “Introduction to R” tutorial, which will include content and formative tests. The students will work through this in timetabled sessions in the computer lab, with demonstrators present to help those who are having problems.

It will require funding to develop these materials, and I will investigate funding sources. The content is likely to be of interest widely because R is a desirable skill, and the lecturers concerned are happy to make their materials available under a Creative Commons licence, which would allow reuse within other universities. I am in discussion with various people in college about the legal/copyright issues involved with this.