Hello!
These emails can get quite long, but I would really appreciate it if you could read them. (PLSPLSPLSPLS)
Welcome to your first Course Rep email update! For those who don’t know me, I’m Bianca, your Education & Community Officer at UOGSU. I take care of your academic interests and community needs like lobbying the local council.
This will be a regular update email, so you’ll be getting plenty of news, opportunities, things you can get involved in, and, importantly, things I’m looking for your views on!
This will be a regular update email, so you’ll be getting plenty of news, opportunities, things you can get involved in, and, importantly, things I’m looking for your views on!
They take a lot of time to put together, and I’m genuinely trying to give you guys as much information as possible so that you can make the most of being a Course Rep.
A lot of you may not have attended Course Rep training yet, so I’m going to try and make this update as comprehensive as possible.
Student Council nominations are OPEN!
For those who haven’t attended training yet: what is Student Council?
Student Council is one of the top decision-making spaces at UOGSU. It’s where students can influence the direction of the Students’ Union, make decisions, and hold officers to account. We also have a Education & community Sub-council which ALL course reps can come to!
Essentially, if you believe the Students’ Union should be lobbying the university about something...for example, if you think there should be limits on the number of staff paid six-figure salaries... that can become a policy for us to lobby on. But you need students involved in Student Council to make those decisions, because, the SU is governed by students.
There are multiple rep positions currently open, but the 9 that might be of most interest to you guys as Course Reps is School Rep.
School Reps represent their entire school. We have three schools:
- ACE: Arts, Culture & Environment (Example: Animation, architecture, Games dev)
- EHS: Education, Health & Science (Example: Psychology, Paramedics, Nurses, Zoology )
- BCSS: Business, Computing & Social Science (Example: Law, Cyber, Criminology)
As a School Rep, you’re really helping to lead the way on changes happening within your school, informed by what students actually want and need.
For example, each school currently has a separate AI policy regarding how AI is used in assessment. We are looking at how these could potentially be unified, so it will be really important for School Reps to be involved in that conversation and bring the perspectives of their individual schools.
And yes, we also meet up for coffee....Don’t worry... it’s free for you guys. If it’s not coffee, it’ll be tea or hot chocolate, and I’ll always bring snacks. We’ll chat about the biggest concerns in your school and what students are actually experiencing.
If you want to nominate yourself, you can do so here: https://www.uogsu.com/elections/
Course Rep Training
If you haven’t completed Course Rep Training yet, please sign up to ONE training date.
We are able to keep track of who has attended training and who hasn’t. If you sign up but don’t make your session, we’ll get in touch afterwards.
Training dates/sign-up We already had training this week on Monday & Tuesday. These are the ones left! But remeber, there will be a online training suite (PPT you click through and do a quiz)Thursday 8th October: FCH trainingFriday 9th October: CITY training
Course Rep Accreditation
One of the things you can do as a Course Rep is sign up for Course Rep Accreditation.
What does that mean: Essentially, you get accredited for the work you do as a Course Rep. It’s proof that you have contributed, developed skills and taken an active role in representing your course.
It’s points-based, which means it’s extremely accessible and as a part of Course Rep accreditation, you’ll get access to specialist workshops with the Careers Team, where you can bring your CV and LinkedIn and work with them to make sure your Course Rep experience is actually reflected properly.
We want to make sure you can actually articulate those skills in an interview and on your CV , rather than just having “Course Rep” sitting there with no explanation of what you actually did.
A separate course rep accreditation email will go out to all those that sign up with the full details and processes of accreditation!
Turnitin updates
You may have seen the article on MyGlos about this already. I very much work on the rule of “make no assumptions”, so I want to be clear about what we currently know.
The University has made its stance clear that, if Turnitin were to process student submissions using AI in order to train AI, the University would not accept that change.
Turnitin has also released a statement saying that they are not using our student submissions to train generative AI models.
The University is still looking at other models of text matching and academic integrity purposes, so this is something we’ll continue to keep an eye on.
