Had the first of our strategic liaison meetings with the Faculties today - we're trying to get round them all over the next couple of weeks and today was Social Sciences. Had a very productive meeting - we talked about our main services and our plans for them and listened to their feedback. Under teaching and learning we talked about support for learning technologies, our review of our current VLE, technology equipped learning spaces and a feasibility study we're just starting of centralised timetabling. The latter is probably the most contraversial as currently every department draws up its own timetable, inputs it into the system, and we then allocate the rooms. This leads to many clashes, as all departments want to teach at the popular times (or the least unpopular, mainly Mondays and Fridays). If we can do it centrally we should be able to make better use of our teaching space, and ensure an equitable allocation of rooms. Some people will have to teach at 9am on a Monday and 4pm on a Friday though...
The discussion on research centred on the use of our High Performance Computing facility, and the difficulties of storing and curating research data. We also told them about our new collaboration environment, uSpace, which is going live this June, which will enable researchers to collaborate both inside and outside the University and to discover expertise and research interests.
Lots of good discussion around a lot of different topics - it will be interesting visiting all of the Faculties to see what are common interests and what differences there are.
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