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Producing a Department Education Plan
Liz Jones, Associate Professor (Teaching) and Vice-Dean Education of Faculty of Engineering Sciences gives a brief introduction on how to produce a Department Education Plan.
11 July 2023
All departments are now being asked to produce a Department Education Plan (DEPs). This resource is intended to give you the lightest of overviews about how to go about creating them in time for the start of the next academic year.
Focus on just one or two areas
UCL has in the past had quite complicated processes such as ASER. DEPs are *not* ASER. They are much lighter-touch and risk-based. That means you need to identify one or two areas (only) as departments that you feel you need to tackle and decide how you can go about doing that.
Key people in departments will have access to a dedicated Tableau from mid-July that pulls together all the relevant quantitative data (such as continuing students' Annual Programme Survey) to go with all the qualitative information from free text surveys, SSCC minutes and other student inputs.
So you'll be in a good position to identify an area that's a general or persistent problem, and start identifying milestones – spanning more than one year, if that's appropriate.
Find support
There are many people who can support you in this: faculty teams, Arena contacts and others who support learning, such as the Careers team and the Academic Communication Centre.
The idea is to shift attention from comprehensive 'audit' to foregrounding 'what will make the most difference?' Of course, these issues are never simple – if they were, they wouldn't be showing up as troublesome. That's why the new process is designed to let you focus and make a difference in one or two areas.
This is the first year of the new process – it's going to be a learning process for everyone involved. But in future it will be possible to mull over these questions during the year as you review progress.