Programme Review

March 8, 2022

So you’ve decided to embark upon a review of your teaching programmes

We’ve started looking at what we do in some of our programmes. For now we’re starting the process in-house, which means the Scholarship group within the School get to set the direction, speed and path that we take[1]. I thought it would be helpful to lay down some ideas and principles for this process. There are a few things I’d like this review to be, in no particular order:

Why do these things matter? It’s all based on my past experiences of programme development. We’ve done some of the above in most of our previous developments, and when we have they’ve been a positive part of the process - but we’ve never done all of them at the same time. I’ve also seen quite a few programme developments that have not been up to scratch, and they’ve usually done the exact opposite of these things. So these then are the principles I think that will lead us to a successful conclusion, whether we decide that a full redevelopment is needed, or whether we decide that there’s nothing that actually needs to change.

The first task for us is to determine how much change is needed in our undergraduate programmes, if any at all. The model for this is fairly simple: decide what the ideal Computer Science and Software Engineering degree programmes would look like in 2025, then examine how our degree programmes currently are, and if the two are not the same, some change is needed. So that’s what we’re going to do next…


  1. I’m aware that there’s an education development service coming down the track at Cardiff. I got to see a snippet of it, and thankfully it matched my expectations in many ways. However I have no idea how far along the track we are, so we’re forging ahead a bit and we’ll let them catch up to us later as I’m sure they will. At least for now with high-level programme design I’m confident in our abilities, because not to blow our own trumpets but we are really quite good at this. ↩︎

  2. god this management speak is depressing, but I’m struggling for a better and less nauseau inducing phrase. ↩︎


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