Why have the university gone and made claiming demonstrator money even harder
Anonymous submitted on
Wednesday 3rd April 2019
Complete
Last week they suddenly made the following change:
Please note that for Semester 2 there will be a slight change to the process for claiming for demonstration and teaching assistance for ECS Modules and Labs.
Please no longer send claims directly to fpse-demonstrator@soton.ac.uk. Instead, please send claims to the relevant addresses below:
· Timetabled Lab Demonstration: Ecs-LabDemonstrating@soton.ac.uk
· Teaching Assistance: ECS-TeachingAssistance@soton.ac.uk
· MSc Mentoring: ECSMentorCoordinator@soton.ac.uk (unchanged from Semester 1)
General enquiries can still be sent to fpse-demonstrator@soton.ac.uk, but any claim forms sent directly to this address will be returned unprocessed.
So after marking my hours for the month, I need to go copy the spreadsheet and seperate demonstrator hours and marking hours.
Also they require the forms to be named a specific name (the same name for each). However you can't open an excel sheet with the same name.
How to make student's hate the university more...
Also how convenient right before the 'Postgraduate Research Experience Survey'....well this is a pretty bad experience
Responses
Here, you can view the complete set of official responses from the sabbatical officers regarding this submission.
Students' Union replied on
Monday 29th Apr 2019 5:37pm
Hi there,
I come back with an update! As promised, I forwarded your query to the Doctoral College and recieved the following response from the FEPS faculty:
'The changes to the process internally at the beginning of the semester are for internal accountability - we had a real problem with PhD students being asked to work (and actually doing much more work) than the university guidelines allowed which was brought up and discussed at our last couple of Education committees.
In particular, with the old process it was basically impossible to distinguish claims for demonstrating (e.g. in labs) with other “teaching assistance” activities (assessment, teaching, helping prepare teaching materials, …).
The result of that was a change in a number of processes to ensure:
- supervisors were kept in the loop about what work there students were doing;
- students were aware of the university regulations and the right to decline work;
- centrally within the department the number of hours being claimed per student (for the different tasks) are adequately tracked (and reports made to the DoPs monthly so they can identify any problems).'
I hope this helps to clarify your query. If you have any further questions or want to chat through this more, please do not hesitate to drop me an email to vpcommunities@susu.org
Best wishes,
Emily Harrison,
Vice President Student Communities, 2018-19
Students' Union replied on
Friday 12th Apr 2019 4:07pm
Hi there,
Thank you for your You Make Change submission.
I have recieved a similar You Make Change submission. I will copy my response to that here for your convenience:
This does sound unnecessarily complicated! I must admit, I do not know what the exact reason for this current set up is and what the barriers to a website or interface such as you describe are. I will contact the Doctoral College and raise this issue and come back to you as soon as I have an update!
I have sent both your submission and the previous one to the Doctoral College to ask for their response and to look into the issue. As I said above, I will come back toy ou as soon as I have an update.
Kind regards,
Emily Harrison,
Vice President Student Communtiies, 2018-19
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Forwarded to Student Communities
Friday 5th Apr 2019 1:04pm
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