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- An attempt to impose invasive online proctoring system for 2019-20 academic year exams
- Maximum registration period decreased for some of the students
- 2020-21 academic year coursework assignments were published too late without delaying the deadlines
- Most of the study materials are obsolete
- University slow response to students' questions/inquiries
- Lack of feedback on courseworks and exams
- Unreliable UOL software infrastructure
Site last updated: July 17, 2021
This project is maintained by current students of University of London BSc 'Computing and information systems' and BSc 'Creative computing' international online programs (CIS/CC, for short). We are tracing university administration violations of their own policies, agreements and common sense expectations.
The reason for creating this project is the current situation with CIS/CC programs. A few years ago CIS/CC were average quality distance/online programs, generally worth time and money the students had spent on them.
This situation changed radically in 2020. Rapid deterioration of CIS/CC programs quality started with an attempt of UOL to impose invasive online proctoring system for 2019-20 academic year exams. Later, in September 2020 CIS/CC programs were closed for new applicants and the maximum registration period for remaining students was decreased.
In 2019 UOL started BSc Computer Science program at Coursera. This new program is approx. 2x times more expensive than CIS/CC. In September 2020 CIS/CC students were advised to switch to the new program. They were given 1 week to figure everything out, get the answers from the UOL and make a decision about their further education.
The new 2020-21 academic year has brought some new violations of UOL policies and agreements between the university and CIS/CC students (see list of cases). During the discussion of these matters at 'Student Cafe' forum Dr. Maggie Cooper, Programmes Director advised us to follow the official complaint procedure.
Being aware of the complaint procedure we at the same time are sceptical about the ability of this approach to resolve current situation (e.g. it was not enough to stop invasive online proctoring during previous exams). Since the complaint procedure is not very effective, we decided to create this project as the public incentive for the university to straighten its course of action.
We are planning to employ both official complaint procedure and this project pages (and, possibly, other approaches, too) in order to resolve the described problems.
Update from June 2021: during the 2020-21 academic year the situation got even worse. UOL refused to discuss or fix any of violations described on these pages and also introduced a few new ones. At this point there's hardly single aspect of CIS/CC programs left that is not seriously flawed or broken. Also, it should be mentioned that some cases were left outside the scope of this project just because there's no bulletproof documentary evidence to support them (but that doesn't mean that students were not affected by those cases)
Date: 01 June 2020
Severity: High
Number of students affected: 200+
Description: Right before the examination period of 2019-20 the university made an attempt to impose invasive online proctoring system Proctortrack on CIS/CC students. The complaint letter was composed, signed by 108 students and sent to professor Mary Stiasny. This letter didn't have an immediate effect on UOL actions. Some time after that a petition was posted at Change.org. It was signed by 215 students. Finally, 26th of June 2020 UOL gave up the idea of using Proctortrack during 2019-20 CIS/CC examinations.
Kanban status: Resolved
Status change date: 26 June 2020
Date: 10 September 2020
Severity: High
Number of students affected: n/a (probably, 10-100 students)
Description: 10th September 2020 'Notification of the withdrawal of the BSc Computing and Information Systems and BSc Creative Computing programmes' was sent to the students by Ms Pamela Roberts, Director of Student Recruitment and Enrollment. Here's an excerpt from this letter:
Following a review of our distance and flexible learning programmes, the University of London has decided to close the above programmes to new applicants. The programmes are to be phased out. However, you will still be able to complete the programme by the academic year 2024 – 2025, after which time these programmes will no longer be offered. This means that your maximum period of registration from your effective date of registration (the first time you registered with us on this programme) will no longer be a full eight-year period for the BSc.
The withdrawal of the programmes will not affect the quality or nature of your studies in any way. Both Goldsmiths, University of London and the University of London remain committed to you and all other students studying the BSc Computing and Information Systems programme or the BSc in Creative Computing. We will continue to ensure that the programmes are delivered to the usual high academic standard throughout the notice period.
Aside from the fact that the first paragraph of this letter contradicts with the second paragraph, the cited text also means that some of the students, probably, faced the situation when they would no longer be able to successfully complete their BSc program. CIS/CC Programme specification) (2020, p.6) has explicit values for the maximum and minimum periods of registration for BSc programmes:
It is a known fact that some of the students, who work full-time, were planning to use all the possible period of their registration. Also, some of them were taking a year off (which is allowed by the UOL regulations). Considering the edge case scenario of BSc student, who enrolled in autumn 2019, we'll see 25% decrease of max. registration period.
For the 'Work Experience Entry Route' (which has the max. registration period of 3 years itself) students, who enrolled during autumn 2019, BSc CIS/CC program has become unavailable (assumption based on Program specification text).
Kanban status: Backlog
Status change date: 10 September 2020
Date: 01 December 2020
Severity: High
Number of students affected: 100-200
Description: According to established practice level 4 and 5 first coursework assignments are to be given to students 2 months before deadline, roughly 9 weeks. Nevertheless, during 2020-21 academic year the assignments were published with a significant delay. For example:
- CO2209 - Database systems coursework 1 assignment was released with 3 weeks to complete;
- CO2226 - Software engineering, algorithm design and analysis coursework 1 - with 5 weeks to complete;
- CO2220 - Graphical Object-Oriented and Internet programming in Java coursework 1 - with 6 weeks to complete.
Most of Level 6 courseworks were also published too late, giving the students 4 weeks, in average, to complete the assignments.
The university decided not to change any of coursework deadlines. This situation caused many students an unprecedented stress, especially those taking six Level 6 modules and the Final Year Project.
In December 2020 these matters were discussed with Dr. Maggie Cooper at the 'Student cafe' UOL forum. She told the students that coursework deadlines wouldn’t be delayed. Instead of this, she said that
Reducing the time available will mean a corresponding reduction in the level of work students will be able to produce, and examiners will expect this and adjust the marking accordingly.
Being asked about the explicit marking scheme for this new reduced type of courseworks, she refused to provide any. A quick note: assessment criteria for the regular courseworks and examinations are available to students at page 31 of Programme regulations 2020-21). An absence of explicit criteria opens the door to misinterpretation and can adversely affect students' grades. Although, later, 23rd of December 2020, Kärt Luik, Programme Manager posted a message with a hint about new marking criteria:
Examiners will be expecting less detail, proportionate to the reduction in time available, not partially-completed submissions. Note that we have also adjusted coursework where detailed work is required.
it was already too late, in our opinion, as the students should have been in the middle of their work by then.
This is a mitigating circumstance by definition:
Mitigating circumstances are any serious circumstances beyond your control which may have adversely affected your academic performance. (General regulations, p.17)
Being asked if the students could treat this as a mitigating circumstance and, therefore, hand over their courseworks later, Dr. Maggie Cooper refused to count it as a mit.circ.
Also, it could be proved that at least one of the assignments (CO2226 coursework) was not adjusted according to reduced time available. You can compare coursework assignments for 2018-19, 2019-20 and 2020-21 yourself and see that neither the structure, nor the level of difficulty have changed. After the interim grades for Coursework 1 were published in March 2021 a few students were complaining that at least some of the grades were also not adjusted properly.
January 29, 2021 students have filled at least one complaint letter. March 10, 2021 (1.5 months later) UOL responded to this complaint, once again stating that all of its actions were justified and necessitated.
Kanban status: Official complaint
Status change date: 29 January 2021
Date: n/a
Severity: High
Number of students affected: 300+
Description: Most of the written course materials are quite old (some of them were published 15+ years ago). While this is not a problem for fundamental disciplines like Discrete math, it may be an issue for rapidly changing fields of study like Networking, Databases or AI. This problem is mitigated (to some extent) by regularly updated lists of recommended literature.
Here's the complete list of course materials' years of publication:
| Course id | Course name | Year of publication |
|---|---|---|
| CO1102 | Mathematics for computing | 2004, 2005 |
| CO1108 | Information systems: foundations of e-business | 2010 |
| CO1109 | Introduction to Java and object-oriented programming | 2007 |
| CO1110 | Introduction to computing and the internet | 2018, 2019 |
| CO1112 | Creative computing I: image, sound and motion | 2014, 2019 |
| CO2209 | Database systems | 2016 |
| CO2220 | Graphical object-oriented and internet programming in Java | 2009 |
| CO2222 | Data communications and enterprise networking | 2005 |
| CO2226 | Software engineering,algorithm design and analysis | 2006, 2007 |
| CO2227 | Creative computing 2: interactive multimedia | 2008 |
| CO3310 | Artificial intelligence | 2013 |
| CO3311 | Neural networks | 2009 |
| CO3318 | Information systems management | 2009 |
| CO3320 | Project | 2012 |
| CO3323 | Electronic commerce | 2008 |
| CO3325 | Data compression | 2004 |
| CO3326 | Computer security | 2009 |
| CO3346 | Sound and music | 2010 |
| CO3348 | Interaction design | 2010 |
| CO3352 | Operations research and combinatorial optimisation | 2010 |
| CO3353 | Software engineering project management | 2013 |
| CO3354 | Introduction to natural language processing | 2013 |
| CO3355 | Advanced graphics and animation | 2014 |
Kanban status: Backlog
Status change date: 01 February 2021
Date: n/a
Severity: High
Number of students affected: n/a (probably, half of the students)
Description: Among CIS/CC students UOL is notoriously known for its slow reaction to student's inquiries and official forum questions. While it is not usually the case, sometimes students have to wait for weeks before their inquiry is being handled properly or their questions being answered.
Update from June 2021: Actually, during the 2020-21 academic year the situation got even worse. Now some of the inquiries are not handled for a few months.
Kanban status: Backlog
Status change date: 01 February 2021
Date: n/a
Severity: High
Number of students affected: all the students
Description:
(Note: this is not a violation of UOL policies but instead it's rather serious flaw in CIS/CC programmes structure.)
According to Programme specification, p.20) UOL provides two types of feedback on students' courseworks and exams:
- "Past examination papers, as well as examiners’ commentaries on past examinations providing generic feedback on assessment, are updated annually..." As this feedback is generic in nature, it doesn't cover many students' individual mistakes. Also, it only becomes available one year after the exams, when previous academic year is long gone and students don't remember much from their examination papers.
- "Detailed individual feedback is currently provided for coursework assignments in three courses." This phrase means that 3 out of 14 courses will have individual feedback attached to graded courseworks. This rule is not strictly followed, as some students report the lack of this promised feedback on their courseworks.
Students almost never know where exactly they lost their marks. In case the student does not agree with the examination/coursework results, he can not dispute them on academic grounds. Only administrative recheck (for additional price) is allowed (General regulations, p.17).
Interestingly enough, UOL provides coursework grades distribution pie charts annually, while the examination pie charts are not provided. As the examinations are responsible for 80% of the final grade for each course (except the Final Project), those pie charts would be much more valuable from the feedback pespective.
Because of non-transparent nature of exams/courseworks grading it's almost impossible to obtain documented proves for some cases (e.g. unfair/erroneous grading).
It has become a common knowledge that feedback is one of the keys to successfull learning, while the lack of feedback severely impaires student's progress and motivation. From this point of view, aforementioned UOL feedback policy is far from normal educational practices. Being asked about this, Programmes Director prefered to defend quite unprofessional point of view, according to which this level of feedback is enough for the students.
Kanban status: Backlog
Status change date: 16 June 2021
Date: February - May 2021
Severity: High
Number of students affected: >10
Description:
-
During 2020-21 academic year the registration period was extended till March 01, 2021. Among other things this means that students had to pay for their registered modules until this date. It turned out that UOL payment system was malfunctioning (unexpectedly for some of the students) at the end of the registration period. Some students’ credit/debit card payments were rejected without a reason. The official UOL message board recommendation was to just fill in the payment form again and correct the errors. According to some evidence the problem was at UOL’s side, particularly, incorrect/absent queries to 3DSecure system during online transactions. Because of these payment issues students had to search for alternative ways to pay for their study, filling inquiries, writing forum posts - all this under the time pressure, as the registration window was closing. Some of the students had their inquiries resolved days after the registration closed. We are not aware of the facts of registration failure due to aforementioned problem although, this has definitely caused an unnecessary stress for many students.
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May 2021 examinations were held online (due to COVID-19 pandemic). Examination duration range was from 2h 45min to 3h 30min depending on the module. During the exam students were expected to log in to VLE (virtual learning environment), download the exam paper and upload their work before the examination time is over. Some students were reporting different VLE software issues during the examination. For example, in many cases VLE button was not available from the main UOL portal page. In some cases there was an uninformative error message during the uploading process. Some students were not able to upload their work in time because of these technical issues and had to fill in official inquiries. We are unaware of the results of those inquiries at the moment.
One possible explanation for these software issues is that aforementioned software wasn't tested properly (including black-box testing and stress testing).
Kanban status: Backlog
Status change date: 16 June 2021
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