What makes you grin? Antidote to grumpy thread

[Guest Hooli]

  On 21/09/2018 at 20:54, richardmorris said:

Back in 1990 my chemistry course was lectures from 9 TIL 12 sometimes till 2pm, and usually labs from 2 TIL 5. At minimum, if you hadn’t finished you carried on.

No free periods.

I’m always rather annoyed by the right wing press ( mail, express etc) that think students have one lecture a week and laze about. Not in the sciences anyway.

 

yeah but no one does sciences anymore, it's all media studies

 

/stereotype

[Fumbler]

From what I'm experiencing, that's quite true. Now to make some apprenticeship applications...

[Ghosty]

Who's this Grant?

[iainrcz]

  On 22/09/2018 at 02:08, Ghosty said:

Who's this Grant?

Phil's brother.

 

Sent from my VFD 710 using Tapatalk

[DVee8]

[Tadhg Tiogar]

  On 21/09/2018 at 20:13, Hooli said:

Rotherham Foundation Trust

I thought trust was in short supply in Rotherham after the scandals they've had there....!

[MarvinsMom]

  On 21/09/2018 at 20:54, richardmorris said:

I’m always rather annoyed by the right wing press ( mail, express etc) that think students have one lecture a week and laze about. Not in the sciences anyway.

you did the wrong course,

 

my kid sister was literally going into the univertisty for an hour long "tutorial" every week  while studying for her BA English Literature degree.

 

she got a 2.1 in the end i believe, much better than my unclassified B.Eng in Civil Engineering & Building, which i got by collecting the tokens from perticipating Texaco petrol stations......

[Guest Hooli]

  On 22/09/2018 at 08:02, Tadhg Tiogar said:

I thought trust was in short supply in Rotherham after the scandals they've had there....!

 

No you need a positive outlook, you can trust the 'locals' to be untrustworthy.

[quicksilver]

It amazes me how little contact time there is in a typical 3-year degree and I'm sure I would have got bored with the slow pace. I did an 'intensive' 2-year computer science degree but compared with a workplace even that wasn't really intensive. Some days there was only one session, most did have morning and afternoon sessions but with enough free time around them to do other things, and most terms we had at least one full day off. The worst was a 4-hour session, 9am to 1pm on Monday mornings but there was nothing else that day. 3-4 hours a day, 4 days a week was typical and we still got regular 2-3 week holidays.

 

I still reckon if it was done 9-5, 5 days a week with no holidays and treated like a job, it would be perfectly possible to complete a typical undergrad degree in one year. That would certainly be better preparation for the real world and avoid that culture shock when graduates enter the workplace after 3 years of dossing around at uni. I think it would appeal to mature students who are used to the 9-5 too.

[Guest Hooli]

I think it'd make education a hell of a lot cheaper too. Paying for buildings/staff/lecturers etc for one year not four will obviously save 75%.

[The Moog]

Our students have 15 hours contact time a week and are expected to do the same in self study - including research, case studies etc.

 

The self study is more important than a lecturer standing in front of you. We aren't teachers - the focus is so much more on self discovery and application.

 

So 30 hours a week of studying is the expected workload which isn't too shabby.

 

Whether they do that is a different story

 

 

9-5 Mon - Fri wouldn't work as well. You need time to digest and get things in your head.

[fairkens]

  On 22/09/2018 at 12:08, The Moog said:

Our students have 15 hours contact time a week and are expected to do the same in self study - including research, case studies etc.

 

The self study is more important than a lecturer standing in front of you. We aren't teachers - the focus is so much more on self discovery and application.

 

So 30 hours a week of studying is the expected workload which isn't too shabby.

 

Whether they do that is a different story

 

 

9-5 Mon - Fri wouldn't work as well. You need time to digest and get things in your head.

My law degree had 9 hours contact a week and Mrs F's English Lit degree 3 hours a week on average but if you didn't do the work yourself you wouldn't get close to passing either.

 

It's why you 'read' a subject at uni rather than 'study' a topic

 

Grin for today - it's Mrs F's due date today, looking forward to meeting junior in the not so distant future

[chadders]

I don't know how many hours of lectures my youngest had on his science Masters, which he just passed, but he was in there by about 8 am and left the library or his lectures between by about 6 to 7pm. Needless to say there was also weekend work, especially around exam time.

[Guest Hooli]

Science you see, it's a real subject that's why.

[cobblers]

I managed to do a full time electronic engineering degree alongside working 45 hours a week. I have no idea how I managed it TBH it'd kill me nowadays - from 9am-8pm 7 days a week if I wasn't at uni I'd be working at Halfords, most of the time I was the oldest member of staff in the place and I was about 22 at the time, I ran the bikehut bit. 

 

Looking back it's madness really, but I ended up with a 2:1 and wasted a lot of money on beer and fancy alloys for my pineappled Lupo, it could have gone worse I suppose.

[GrumpiusMaximus]

  On 19/09/2018 at 21:24, Hooli said:

Ekk! I've been balded!

He’s fallen in the water...!

[GrumpiusMaximus]

  On 22/09/2018 at 12:08, The Moog said:

Our students have 15 hours contact time a week and are expected to do the same in self study - including research, case studies etc.

 

The self study is more important than a lecturer standing in front of you. We aren't teachers - the focus is so much more on self discovery and application.

 

So 30 hours a week of studying is the expected workload which isn't too shabby.

 

Whether they do that is a different story

 

 

9-5 Mon - Fri wouldn't work as well. You need time to digest and get things in your head.

We had about 10 contact hours in a week and quite frequently were told to come back in two weeks so we can see what you’ve done. So it was more a Masters-style of course but at Undergraduate.

 

I loved it and did well out of that model...

[The Moog]

  On 22/09/2018 at 14:19, GrumpiusMaximus said:

We had about 10 contact hours in a week and quite frequently were told to come back in two weeks so we can see what you’ve done. So it was more a Masters-style of course but at Undergraduate.

 

I loved it and did well out of that model...

That is much more the model now.

 

Pure knowledge is less important with the rise of Google scholar and access to information - we now aim to get students to develop their higher level skills - project work, self management, team work etc.

 

I have been running leadership classes with Augmented Reality elements all created by students. This has been up to them to create in their own time, they learn far more than me standing talking at them for 2 hours.

[Tamworthbay]

Hmm, could explain why some of the new graduates I have the pleasure of training know so little. But sadly the Uni’s they are from certainly don’t seem to have done much on the higher level thinking either. There are some great ones but over the last ten years the number that are just far too far off making the level we need has increased massively to the point where our induction length has nearly doubled. (Speaking on Science graduates)

[Guest Hooli]

  On 22/09/2018 at 14:15, GrumpiusMaximus said:

He’s fallen in the water...!

 

I know, I'll light a German match. They'll never fire on their own matches!

[vulgalour]

NEEEEOOOOOOOWWNNNN

 

ZOOOOOOM

 

Really great to see an Austin Cambridge hurtling about in the wild today.

[GrumpiusMaximus]

  On 22/09/2018 at 14:41, The Moog said:

That is much more the model now.

 

Pure knowledge is less important with the rise of Google scholar and access to information - we now aim to get students to develop their higher level skills - project work, self management, team work etc.

 

I have been running leadership classes with Augmented Reality elements all created by students. This has been up to them to create in their own time, they learn far more than me standing talking at them for 2 hours.

 

 

I started Uni 10 years ago (Where the Hell did all that time go?!) and most of what we did required far, far more than just knowledge.  Most of it was skills-based, programming, pattern recognition, logical reasoning, problem-solving, etc.  It was a very weird degree but the level of freedom we were given over our work was remarkable.  I'd have an idea for a project, tell my supervisor, they'd ask to see a prototype or a proof-of-concept and I'd report back to them, with some lectures on the way guiding us.

 

Bizarrely, it was a music technology degree at Lancaster.  With that said, I mostly made mine aesthetics and composition - which are not what most of those creative arts degrees are like.  Knowledge was never really a problem but what was difficult was learning (for instance) how to write software for motion capture.  I did some that tracked motion and translated it into sound, either generating or manipulating samples based on XY co-ordinates of a selected tracking point using a webcam.  One guy called David on my course wrote software using the original Kinect that tracked dancers (he choreographed and wrote music for them) that then projected manipulated 3-D images of the dancers in real-time onto a muslin screen that was in front of them.  In the glasses, it looked like they were dancing around versions of themselves.  Really amazing stuff - especially when you consider he was an Undergrad. 

 

He's now a freelance technology consultant...

[robinmasters]

I don't often watch television at the moment, but I'm currently watching Fifth Gear, and it appears that Jason Plato has turned into James May.

 

[The Moog]

 

 

  On 22/09/2018 at 14:50, Tamworthbay said:

There are some great ones but over the last ten years the number that are just far too far off making the level we need has increased massively to the point where our induction length has nearly doubled. (Speaking on Science graduates)

It's a numbers game now as well once the university caps have been removed. Got to fill courses so lower entry requirements combined with and unwillingness to fail people.

 

Interestingly the trend is for generation Z to skip uni altogether. We are looking a steep drop in numbers with people frightened to take on debt linked with high number of unemployed grads. Anyway all for another discussion

 

In good news got my start date for my PhD - starting in January so just enjoying my last bit of free time

[GrumpiusMaximus]

Moog, that's bloody great news.  Best of luck with the PhD!

 

I think I saw the beginning of the 'numbers' game, if I'm honest.  We were in the second-round of student fees (£3,000ish a year) and there were a couple of people that I knew that had absolutely no business being at that University.  They should have been kicked out in their first year but got marked very low - but not quite low enough to actually get rid of them.  Funnily enough, the two in particular I can think of (over two different courses) both left of their own volition anyway... but they should have been failed months before then and told to go home.  Made an absolute mockery of the rest of us.

[Snipes]

  On 22/09/2018 at 18:10, robinmasters said:

I don't often watch television at the moment, but I'm currently watching Fifth Gear, and it appears that Jason Plato has turned into James May.

 

IMG_20180922_190441.jpg

With a bit of Clarkson mixed in there too...

[Fumbler]

I haz made a goods internets.

[DVee8]

[Fumbler]

I've heard of the Mary poem before. That is a good one.

[dozeydustman]

  On 23/09/2018 at 18:58, DVee8 said:

 

 

London Bridge is falling down,

falling down, falling down,

London Bridge is falling down,

Blame Balfour Beatty