Setting Up A Degree - The Start...

You would think that setting up a degree course, particularly when you already have the syllabus and all the documentation would be easy. Trust me it is not!

Degrees at Universities tend to have grown organically over time, and this period of growth may be just a few years, or in some cases over decades or even centuries. Plus, degrees evolve, you may have all the documentation, but things 'on the ground' may not be truly reflected on the page. Things drift and change. And this raises an interesting problem - just how much of it is documented, and just how much is in 'institutional memory' that has been passed down from lecturer to lecturer, administrator to administrator, and technician to technician? As it turns out not a lot of this is documented, and what little is documented is usually only available in a fragmented form.

I have actually encountered this sort of problem before and it is one of modelling a system, and this can be tricky....

A few years ago I was involved in some work to create an international standard for recording and documenting what I thought was a fairly simple and straightforward lab technic in proteomics, that is, how do you document and record the process of separating a mixture of proteins in to individual proteins for further analysis (see Gibson,F., Anderson,L., Babnigg,G., Baker,M., Berth,M., Binz,P.A., Borthwick,A., Cash,P., Day,B.W., Friedman,D.B., Garland,D., Gutstein,H.B., Hoogland,C., Jones,N.A., Khan,A., Klose,J., Lamond,A.I., Lemkin,P.F., Lilley,K.S., Minden,J., Morris,N.J., Paton,N.W., Pisano,M.R., Prime,J.E., Rabilloud,T., Stead,D.A., Taylor,C.F., Voshol,H., Wipat,A., Jones,A.R. (2008) Guidelines for reporting the use of gel electrophoresis in proteomics (MIAPE: Gel Electrophoresis). Nature Biotechnology 26 863-864 - correspondence- pdf - additional material). This was difficult. What do you record? What is important and what is not? How do you record things? For example, is the colour of the socks worn by the scientist important (the answer is no), is the time of day the experiment was performed important (could be yes, and should be recorded), what chemicals were used, how was the experiment performed? What do you record? Then you get to the problem of what words mean - what is an experiment? What is an assay? What is a project? This is all tricky stuff. It may sound trivial, but it is not.

Essentially, what we were trying to do in MIAPE (the paper mentioned above) was model the process of doing the experiment such that all the relevant data was recorded so that other researchers could evaluate the procedure, carry it out in their lab, and combine the results from other labs with their own data sets.

However, how do you model a degree? How do you pull together all the data that outlines what happens, and what needs to happen?

If you speak to someone with a pedagogical background they will talk about the syllabus, meeting learning outcomes, procedures for running the degree etc. but the problem with that is it is NOT the degree, that is the description, the meta-data if you like. What is needed is the model of the degree, what is in it, how many lectures, seminars and labs, and surprisingly (or not) that is not normally or readily available.

The reason this information is not usually available is because as I said above, degrees grow organically over time and a lot of the information is held in institutional memory, however, there is one possible source for this information where it may in fact be recorded, it is in The Timetable!

Think about it. All lecture, seminars and labs are held in the Timetable, that is, if you like, the Timetable provides the skeleton of the degree as it is the data as opposed to the meta-data that is captured in the syllabus and learning outcomes.

In the next post I will look at how you can use the data in the Timetable to build up the structure of the degree, and how that in turn can be used to transplant the degree to a new location.

Photo: A local monkey in a tree!