Our Sabbatical Officers have been working closely with our Academic Reps to enhance your academic experience at UCL. We understand how important it is for students to feel heard, which is why we’ve listened to your feedback and compiled a report on Representing your Academic Interest. This report focuses on seven key areas for improvement, with recommendations co-developed alongside UCL to ensure your voice is central to the changes.

What are we recommending? 

Improve teaching standards

In the area of teaching, we recommend UCL continue delivering their Programme Excellence Project in partnership with students, ensuring that modules and assessments are streamlined and equitable and that students are supported consistently. In the academic year 2024/2025, every programme will be reviewed against UCL’s new curriculum design principles and taking on board feedback from Academic Reps to ensure vigour and coherence. 

Capture more lectures

To improve learning opportunities, we are urging greater use of lecture capture across UCL to ensure that more recordings are made available to more students in a more timely manner, regardless of the size of their cohort. To facilitate this, UCL is introducing a new lecture capture system in 2025 which will make it easier for staff to record, edit, and publish their lectures.  

Use diverse assessment methods to provide more feedback opportunities

Assessment and feedback is a particular sticking point for UCL. We are therefore calling on programmes to offer a diversity of assessment methods that are distributed across the duration of modules to avoid assessment bunching and increase opportunities for feedback between assessments. UCL has already published a set of principles which demand that feedback should be timely and geared toward learning enhancement, and has launched a new in-personal digital examination service which allows for a mixture of different assessment tools to be implemented. Additionally, in 2025 as part of the Programme Excellence Project, programme leads will review and make changes to their assessments.  

Provide stronger academic support

For academic support, we are advocating that UCL deliver on the finding and recommendation of their recent Review of Personal Tutoring Arrangements. These recommendations are being piloted across UCL, with the aim of setting new standards for personal tutoring that ensure tutors provide better support to students.  

Make timetables work better for everyone through timely scheduling

We recommend that UCL work to improve scheduling so that students receive their timetables in a timely fashion, and that these timetables are inclusive of learner needs and supportive of their attendance. We are please to hear that despite limited space on campus, UCL is committed to working with student to develop timetables based on their feedback.  

Ensure learning resources are accessible and consistently shared

Learning resources are one of UCL’s strengths in the NSS, but we can’t afford to be complacent. There’s always room for improvement, and we’re committed to making them even better. We are therefore asking UCL to ensure that Moodle pages are reviewed to ensure that they remind organised, accessible, and up to date. In the coming months, UCL will be reviewing the progress of a recent project which set new standards for Moodle pages across the university, with a specific focus on usability, accessibility, and consistency. 

Amplify student voice

In the area of Student Voice, following the agreement of new principles for Student Partnership Committees that seek to promote cocreation and richer student engagement, we are urging UCL continue to adopt these principles and continue to work with Academic Representatives to ensure these are consistently and effectively implemented across UCL. 

What’s next? 

We’re committed to making these changes happen and we are actively supporting colleagues across UCL departments to make the student experience better for you.

We have already committed to a range of actions in response to student feedback. These are wide-ranging, covering everything from the launch of Departmental Hubs intended to amplify the student voice and build stronger departmental communities to a more concerted foregrounding the our Academic Reps and Sabbatical Officers and all the work they do; from improved feedback mechanisms between Academic Reps and Sabbs and the wider student body to close persistent feedback loops to bolstering the influencing potential of our existing annual Policy Zone Summit and Academic Rep Conferences