Membership
Programme committee should consist of the chair of ASC (ex officio), five members elected by the ASC, one student representative and additional co-opted members up to a maximum of eight.
The five elected members will be appointed from the ASC on an annual basis using a system of nomination followed by a single transferable vote in the case where there are more than five nominees.
Additional co-opted members (who may or may not be members of the ASC) may be appointed by the programme committee as necessary.
Remit
Programme committee should be responsible for the following:
- soliciting and recommending, each year, a programme consisting of core courses and specialist courses (these designations are explained below). No less than 60% of the programme should be core courses. The committee should ensure that each course has a lecturer (willing and available for the year in question), a title, a list of prerequisites and a syllabus which summarises the key points of the content (not a lecture by lecture list of content). Programme committee should give clear guidance as to the key topics to be addressed by each core course. The programme should be guided by three principles: the aim of MAGIC is to address breadth of knowledge before depth; the programme should enable students to see the connection between cognate courses, to give some coherence to the programme; there should be a high level of transparency and consultation in the dealings of programme committee.
- monitoring the teaching quality of programme delivery, to include monitoring feedback questionnaires. At the end of each year, and before the next year's programme is ratified, a report on quality should be presented to ASC. Programme decisions for the next year should take this quality report into account.
Evidence
Programme committee should be informed by evidence including the following : a report from each node about their core needs for the coming academic year; previous up-take of core courses (in the transition to developing the core the committee should consider previous core-like courses); the range of specialist courses already available, and their up-take; the feedback questionnaires; the minutes of the Advisory Committee and the yearly report to EPSRC. Programme committee may wish to take further advice from Advisory Committee members.The review discussed possible definitions for "core" and "specialist" (or core/non-core as the original MAGIC proposal has it) and suggest the definitions below as a starting point for an incoming programme committee to consider. We recognise in particular that (a) the committee will need to engage with current lecturers in a constructive and diplomatic way if any courses are to be changed and (b) the committee will need to be mindful that there may need to be a period of transition to whatever system is being introduced.
Core courses.
A core course is one which should be available each year and which addresses the needs of sufficiently many nodes. A core course should therefore be able to be transferred between lecturers. Programme committee should be responsible for deciding the title, the prerequisites, the length (10 or 20 hours) and the key topics to be addressed, but each lecturer should be responsible for the details of how those key topics are presented. In the transition to establishing core courses it may be necessary to adjust courses which are already designed, but the costs of this will need to be taken into account. Programme commitee should also look at the desirability of combining current courses to obtain core courses, with possibly more than one lecturer, and invite the lecturers of these current courses to discuss how best to achieve this.
Specialist courses.
A specialist course should be 10 hours in length and can be pitched either at entry level (i.e., assuming no more than undergraduate level material) or build on core material which has already been taught. The syllabus of a specialist course is entirely determined by the lecturer, who should provide to programme committee a title, a list of prerequisites, a summary of the syllabus including the key topics to be covered. There is no expectation that another lecturer will be available to continue the course in future years. The term "specialist" should not be interpreted as meaning "more advanced": the specialist courses taken altogether should represent a broad cover of mathematics topics outside the core but within the needs of the MAGIC network.