The semester reporting meetings take place as an integral part of the evaluation culture across courses and study levels at Comparative Literature and involves both students and teachers. At Comparative Literature’s semester reporting meetings, all lecturers and representatives of all courses meet and jointly review the previous semester’s teaching.
The purpose of the activity is to invite students and teachers to come together to review a course from several perspectives and in the context of the entire degree programme. The students and teachers should reflect together on the student evaluations and transfer the experience from one semester to the next. The desired outcome of the activity is that the student evaluations are used actively for the improvement of the teaching activities, that a more explicit connection is created among the courses in the programme, and that both students and teachers feel they are being seen and heard.
The meetings are attended by all teachers and student representatives from all courses at Comparative Literature. Class representatives are elected at the last teaching session before the exam period.
The meetings are scheduled between the semesters (end of February for the autumn semester and end of September for the spring semester), and the exam periods are taken into account.
Before the meeting a qualitative report must be written for each course. This is done by the teacher on the basis of the oral and digital evaluations of the course. The report must include the course handbook and the qualitative evaluation by the teacher and must be “signed” by the student representatives from the course. The digital evaluation with qualitative comments must be sent to the head of section, but should not be included in the report for the semester reporting meeting. The report must be sent to the section consultant, who collects all the course reports for a joint report, which is circulated to everyone for inspection before the meeting.
At the meetings the teaching activities of the previous semester are reviewed, and it is discussed whether there is an optimal relationship between course activities and type of examination.
The meetings take approx. three hours, and the only item on the agenda is the review of around fifteen semester reports.
The tone is informal and constructive, and both problems and best practices are addressed.
About 15 minutes are allocated for each course. Normally, the teacher begins by giving a brief comment on their report before the students voice their opinion, and the discussion can then begin.
Once each course in the semester has been reviewed, an overall look is taken at the entire semester, the total workload and how this was distributed.
Minutes are taken of the meeting by the section consultant, who shares the minutes with everyone in the section on Blackboard.
Different academic environments require different ways of passing on their experience. But the creation of a discussion space that is open to both students and teachers from across a degree programme with a strong focus on the individual courses provides a solid basis for the exchange of experience and the creation of mutual respect among all parties.
This example of practice is developed in connection to "Projekt 1. studieår", where initiatives for retention at the faculty of arts at Aarhus University was mapped.
