Education Office Newsletter n°14 - July 2012

CONTENTS

• DAF Human Ressources
• Rankings
• Directives on Lecturers
• Plagiarism & EPFL
• Supporting Teaching in a Multicultural Environment
• EPFL Housing Office
• OGIF
• EDM Projects: Happy End
• New Courses for Student Associations
• EPFL at "Science Night2 on 7-8 July 2012
• 30 May 2012/EPFL Welcomes Private Schools in French-Speaking Switzerland
• Management of Doctoral Education
• EPFL Doctoral Survey
• EuroTech News

DAF HUMAN RESOURCES DAF
Ms Sabrina Rami-Shojaei has been appointed head of Study Programs Promotion. Currently Head of the HEC-UNIL Career Center, Ms Rami will take up her position on 1 September 2012.
Mr Markus Kunath was appointed Deputy within the Registrar’s Office as from September 2012 to support the Head of Department in the management of doctoral studies.
Mr Yan Luong was hired by the EPFL as Community Manager working at 80%. He will be based at Mediacom and work for the alumni association A3 (25%) as well as for Educational Affairs, with a mission to develop and control our communications on the social networks.
For further information: [email protected]

RANKINGS
The Office of the Dean for Bachelor & Master Education and the Educational Affairs department have decided that, as of next academic year, EPFL would no longer provide student rankings. This is due to the fact that the calculation of rank based on grades obtained is too variable given the structure of our syllabi (due to e.g. optional courses and exchange).
For further information: [email protected]

DIRECTIVES ON LECTURERS
A further consultation will be conducted this summer to finalise the amended version of the directives concerning the allocation of teaching duties. Further information to be posted on the EPFL Assembly website as of 22 August.
For further information: [email protected]

PLAGIARISM & EPFL
A working party comprising the Deans of Research, of the Doctoral School and of Bachelor & Master Education, the President of the Ethics Committee, the General Counsel, the Directors of Research & Educational Affairs and legal experts, is developing the following measures for the start of the 2013 academic year:
• A clear communication strategy to explain plagiarism, including an awareness campaign aimed at students, PhD students, researchers and lecturers
• A detection tool to track instances of plagiarism
• Rules for the processing of identified instances of plagiarism.

For further information: [email protected]

SUPPORTING TEACHING IN A MULTICULTURAL ENVIRONMENT
The CAMPUS II survey showed that teaching languages are a problem for over a quarter of students. Results point out that some lecturers have difficulties in expressing themselves when teaching in French or in English. The Language Centre, supported by CRAFT, will introduce new support measures for the 2012-2013 academic year. Initially a “teaching lunch” and specific accompanying measures will be offered to interested lecturers.

For further details: [email protected]

EPFL HOUSING OFFICE
The Housing Office opened a year ago to support students and PhD students in their search for accommodation, but also to look for further accommodation opportunities with private landlords and other institutions.
Please do contact us if you have any accommodation for rent or if you hear of any opportunity for student housing.
All offers or suggestions will be reviewed by the Housing Office staff – please write to [email protected]

OGIF
After some years on our statistics team, Ms Isabella Aprile is about to embark on a round-the-world trip to explore new horizons. We wish her a fulfilling adventure and warmly thank her for her commitment, availability and the quality of her services. Mr Bertrand Vermot took over by joining the statistics team in early July. Holder of a Master in Mathematics, Mr Vermot spent four years as a researcher at the Institut de Recherche et Documentation Pédagogique in Neuchâtel. We wish him every success in his new duties within OGIF.

Regarding IS-Academia, the academic re-registration form and EDOC application form were both improved to become more user-friendly and functional, which also makes the processing of EDOC forms much easier for managers. Moreover, the project for the management of assistant pools started with a preliminary analysis phase which served to assess current practice within the Sections. IT development is currently being planned and a first version is expected by the start of the academic year.

For further information: [email protected]

EDM PROJECT: Happy End
After almost 5 years, the SAC student files, whether active or older, have been fully computerised, representing some 70,000 files for students or PhD students. In addition to saving space, this guarantees the preservation of data even in case of natural disaster. For active students, all work processes now integrate this new mode of operation. Former student files are stored as a single document, but for recent students, each document is in a separate file, easy to find through the IS-Academia interface and related metadata.
Although some adjustments remain to be made to ensure maximum user-friendliness and to set up a document purging system in compliance with the data protection act, one may consider that the project is almost complete.

For further information: [email protected]

NEW COURSES FOR STUDENT ASSOCIATIONS
Training for the members of student associations is under development further to the findings of a working party made up of various associations on campus as well as representatives of Educational Affairs. As from the autumn 2012 term, students involved in association activities will be given the opportunity to attend various workshops on such themes as the legal framework for associations, the search for sponsors, basics of accounting and team communication techniques. These courses aim at raising awareness as well as improving the day-to-day management of association activities and filling some gaps.

For further information: [email protected]

EPFL AT "SCIENCE NIGHT" ON 7-8 JULY 2012
Six labs were on duty at the EPFL stand: Robotic Systems Laboratory (LSRO), Geodetic Engineering Laboratory (TOPO), Mechanical Metallurgy Laboratory (LMM), Mobile Communications Laboratory (LCM), the Physics Section (practicals group) and the Computational Materials Laboratory (LSMX). Last but not least, the Aéropoly airship filled the park skies during this two-day event. For further details on the experiments displayed:
http://nuitdelascience.epfl.ch/
http://www.ville-ge.ch/culture/nuit/

For further details: [email protected]

30 MAY 2012 - EPFL WELCOMES PRIVATE SCHOOLS IN FRENCH-SPEAKING SWITZERLAND
The meeting was highly successful, as over 60 executives or teachers representing more than twenty schools came to EPFL. They were welcomed by the Dean of Bachelor & Master Education, Prof. H. Girault, and the President of the EPFL-High Schools coordination unit, Prof. R.D.Hersch.
Prof. Girault stressed the challenges facing teaching in the years to come and presented the reforms to be introduced in Bachelor programmes as from the start of the 2013 academic year. Prof. Hersch presented statistics highlighting how students perform based on their secondary school grades. Discussions then turned to the key skills which private schools must impart to their pupils so as best to prepare them for EPFL. Admission terms were also discussed, particularly those governing the international Baccalaureate.

For further information: [email protected]

MANAGEMENT OF DOCTORAL EDUCATION
So as to relieve the Doctoral School Dean’s Office from administrative duties as much as possible, follow-up of doctoral programme administrative assistants will be performed by the Registrar’s Office as part of Mr Kunath’s activities. This changes nothing in current relationships between administrative assistants and heads of doctoral programmes.
The promotion of doctoral education will be conducted by the Study Programs Promotion (SPE) department.
Ms Fabienne Allaire also works under the Registrar’s Office to further manage study plans and timetables, keep web pages up-to-date and produce statistics relating to this field of education. There is an open position for a scientist to complement the Dean’s Office team.
For further information: [email protected]

EPFL DOCTORAL SURVEY
The Doctorat II survey was sent to all EPFL PhD students (about 2000) in February 2012 to sound out their opinion on a number of issues. The response rate was 62% and the sample was representative of the total population in terms of gender, doctoral programmes, type of thesis supervisor and year of registration.
The data were analysed by Roland Tormey from CRAFT. The results are good – a tribute to the quality of the work of Dean Giovanola at the end of his term of office. The main elements of the analysis relate to the following:
• overall PhD student satisfaction is 83%, and the most frequently expressed (42%) grounds for satisfaction at EPFL is research quality & environment,
• involvement in teaching activity, which concerns 76% of PhD students on average, varies from 96% to 27% from one programme to another, and teaching loads also greatly vary from one student to another,
• supervision quality and relevance is inversely proportional to the number of students supervised by the same thesis director,
• although the quality of doctoral courses is acknowledged (satisfaction rate 87%), their relevance to individual research interests is lower (53%),
• the level of stress is too high for 17% of respondents, 1/3 of whom attribute this to supervision,
• career planning resources available to PhD students remain underused.
The next stage will be for the new Dean, Professor Brisken, to analyse these findings in the fall to prepare a list of recommendations.

For further information: [email protected]

EUROTECH NEWS
The EuroTech Universities network (EPFL, Technical University of Denmark, Technische Universiteit Eindhoven and Technische Universität München) is being set up. Premises have been rented in Brussels, a coordinator is being hired and the website is about to be put online. The first ever annual Presidents’ Meeting and the official inauguration will take place in Brussels on 11 and 12 October.
Two joint research projects have been approved in the framework of the Green Tech Initiative: Energy Efficient Buildings and Communities and Interface Science for Photovoltaics. A third project will shortly be initiated in Wind Energy.
The latest Joint Nanoworkshop was held at DTU on 1 June, and the next is to be organised at EPFL in early June 2013 (Sylvain Bréchet of the LPMN Laboratory of the Physics of Nanostructured Materials is in charge).
Regarding exchange, the 1:1 programme recently agreed between DTU and EPFL offers SIE students selected based on personal record the opportunity to complete their second Master year at DTU.
For further information about EuroTech: [email protected], International Relations