Notes Educational Committee Meeting July 1, 2015

Present: Siegfried Nijssen, Michael Lew, Frederique de Paus

The attendance was too low to have a formal meeting. Nevertheless, the following topics were discussed:

- all student members of the OCI should have received a form from the faculty to receive a
fee for participating in the OCI.

- the faculty has let us known that they choose not to include a "not
applicable" option in the evaluation forms as ICLON believes that adding
such an option lowers the quality of the results. Their recommendation is to
either:
 * give additional instructions within the institute on how to fill in the form;
   it is not obligatory to answer every question.
 * choose not to include assistants in the evaluation; every OCI has the choice
   to decide which professors and assistants are mentioned on the form.
Furthermore, it was discussed that several students ICTiB are unhappy about
the facts that professors currently collect the form.
A potential solution that was mentioned was to make a best effort to let
invigilators collect the forms and hand them Abdel. These invigilators
could also be given an instruction sheet regarding the forms and could be asked
to announce these instructions.
 Discussion on this issue will continue in the next academic year.

- The oral evaluation ICTiB was summarized. This evaluation has been forwarded
to Judith and Aske as well, who will also see how to take the
student's comments into account.

- It was discussed that students ICTiB and bioinformatics
have an interest in having courses in their first semester to level the 
backgrounds of the different students in the group. It may be useful to explore 
whether an "introduction to programming" course for these master programmes can be
created.

- The newsletter was discussed. It was agreed upon that the newsletter would
not provide details of particular courses.