Post-Strike FAQ

General Post-Strikes

What is back to normal?

Lectures / tutorials / labs should all be running on their original schedules again, so let us know if something still seems amiss. People should also be reasonably responsive now, so do ask if you’re unsure of anything (almost always this should be on Edstem).

What is still impacted?

Some things will take a bit of time to work properly again. Particularly, if your tutor was striking then this week is the first time they’re doing a tutorial for the course. It might take some familiarising, so please show them some patience. Likewise, any messages you sent during strikes might have become buried, so it might take a while to get to them. If something is urgent/important, please feel free to send a follow up.

What is the plan for the assessment?

We've come to an agreement with the school's management about how to adjust the assessment to account for the disruption without undermining it or causing other problems later on. The summary of that is:

• The deadline is being pushed back a little to Tuesday 10th November.
• You only have to submit for one Learning Outcome, rather than two.
• The second submission will remain at the end of week 11, but you will be able to submit for 5 Learning Outcomes.

Hopefully this means you can still get feedback on how you're going about the reflections, but without any of it being final for your grade on the course at this stage.

More General Assessment

Q: Can we still submit 2 LOs for this deadline?

A: Unfortunately not, as letting everyone submit 5 at the end requires us moving around marker time.

Q: Are we expected to provide screenshots of our project as evidence?

A: Not as a part of the reflection, but the blog posts would benefit from this where appropriate.

Q: What privacy level should we use for the blog posts?

A: Accessible to anyone in the University / with EASE access, will be needed for the markers to see blogs. Instructions here.

Q: Can we add more than one blog post per question?

A: No, you should keep it to one to control how much the marker needs to read through. If you think it would be helpful to talk about changes/contrast between two blogs posts, you could always do that as a part of the later one of them.

Q: Has the deadline for uploading blogs changed?

A: You can still reference any blog post you made ahead of the (new) submission deadline. So any blogs posted up to Tuesday morning would be fine.

Q: Are there office hours for this course?

A: There will be. We'll announce ASAP.

Q: Could you elaborate on the style of reflection, in terms of how academic vs personal experience?

A: It’s still academic writing: formal, respectful. You’re welcome to talk about as much personal stuff as you like within that format. Do talk through your thinking, you can refer to yourself in the first person and use anecdotes.

Q: What things are appropriate to talk about against each Learning Outcome? (We've had a number of question of this kind of format, e.g. "can I talk about my physics group work for LO 2?")

A: If you think you can use it, you almost certainly can. We want you to be reflecting on these skillsets but there's absolutely no need to do that with activities that happened within the course (even in a normal year where there had been plenty of those).

Q: Can we do our own research about topics we're interested in?

A: Absolutely. That should be written up in a blog post rather than form a part of the reflection, but reflecting on doing that kind of self-led learning is exactly the sort of thing LO3 is interested in. Depending on what you research about and how, it might also be a good blog to reference for other LOs.

Q: If the blog post is supplementary material, how is it graded?

A: Grading of the blog post is coarser, as it mostly provides evidence for engagement and isn't expected to be displaying deep thought. The main distinguishing part of the assessment are the answers to the reflective questions.