 Good afternoon. I hope everyone can hear us. Oh, I thought everyone had managed to join, but I see a couple more trying to join now. But I just wanted to sort of welcome you all and to kick things off really, and hopefully if people fall out of the way they can join a bit later and welcome to everyone. But if you can't hear the whole session, then it will be recorded. It's being recorded right now, in fact. So you won't miss out, at least on the information I'll give, even if it may be harder for you to give questions. So I shall start here just with a little explanation of how we are going to all talk together. So I don't know how many of you have used Blackboard before, but if you want to use the microphone, there is an icon sort of at the bottom of the screen in the middle, which you have to click on first before you can use it. Otherwise, you can use the messages. There's a little speech bubble on the left at the bottom of the column on the right-hand side, which has a number of different icons you can press, including the settings one, the share content one, and then the members of the group as well. Now, in terms of managing how we speak, what I'm going to propose is that I'm going to present, first of all, let you know a little bit about our programs, and then I'm going to open the floor for questions. Now, I'm very happy to be interrupted during my presentation, but you'll see that there's a little icon at the bottom for which you can raise your hand. Again, it's near the microphone and video settings. Ooh, I've just really got my video turned off. Nice, this is me. I think you can see me. Before I go any further, can any of you hear me? If you can, just write yes or no in the speech little chat function, where I've already put some instructions. Yes, excellent. Elena, that's great. Nice to hear. Okay, brilliant. That's great that I'm coming across and not just talking to myself, as is sometimes the case. As I was saying, you can just raise your hand in the air. There's a button here. Maybe you can see my raised hand or not now, but there's a button at the bottom of the screen where you can do that. If you do that before and then turn your microphone on, I will be able to respond to that question. Hopefully, I will pick it up. I'm moderating all this myself. That means that I might not get all of your messages. I'll try and keep a handle on them. If I don't, I'll answer them at the end. That's why if you do want to speak, probably just raise your hand and I'll hopefully be able to see that quite clearly. That way, you can ask me a question during the presentation. Otherwise, let's save it to the end. Just one final thing. When you're not speaking, it's good to have your microphone off because if we all have our microphones on, we'll be picking up each other's sounds and there might be an echo and it might be harder for us all to hear each other. So, click it on when you want to speak, but please do click it off when you're not speaking. Okay, so having said all of that now, I'm going to start the presentation. As I said, my name is Andy Newsham. I'm in two parts of SARA. I'm in the Centre for Development and Environment Policy and I'm in Development Studies as well, the Department for Development Studies. I'm the convener of the MSc Climate Change and Development Programme and that's what I want to speak to you today about. Welcome to the session, Sara, by the way. So, I'm going to go through some slides which will hopefully clarify what it is that we're doing with this MSc programme for you and before that, I just want to take you through the presentation structure. So, what we'll talk about first is distance learning at SARAS and we're part of the University of London, as many of you have gathered by now, or previously known. Then we'll talk about why would you want to study climate change and development? I guess you'll have some of your own answers for that but we've certainly got some reasons as well. Then we'll go through how study by distance works. Then we'll talk a bit about our student profile, the kind of people who tend to study with us and then we will go on to look at some of the employers which some of our students have gone on to work for, just so you get a sense of, you know, some of the key points around studying with us by distance learning. So, we offer internationally recognised MSc programmes by distance learning across three centres including SEDEP. We've got over 4,000 students in 160 countries of which over a thousand study would SEDEP. We've been offering distance learning programmes within the University of London for 30 years and the University of London has offered distance learning programmes since 1858. We've got a lot of distance learning students across 180 different countries and some of these, you know, sort of just sound like the statistics which are there to impress you but they're also important in the sense that there is such a long track record here in the pedagogy of distance learning and whilst in SEDEP we've been doing it for 30 years which is quite a long time, we also tap into the much richer longer experience of the University of London and every time we have launched a programme we've had to sort of meet the pedagogical standards of the University of London and adopt them into the way in which we sort of run our programmes. So, there's a lot of thought that's gone into how you study with us which hopefully you'll be the beneficiary of if you come and study with us. We've been in this game for quite a long time by Indian summary. So, why would you come and study climate change and development in particular? Well, my answer to that would be that climate change is probably the most visible environmental problem in the Anthropocene. I'm just wondering does everybody understand what is meant by the term Anthropocene? Some people do, some people don't. Just to clarify the Anthropocene is a term which is supposed to describe a geological era which is marked by human signals in the environmental record that is that we are supposedly out of the Holocene now which is a stable period climatic period which is coincided with the rise of huge civilisation stroke empires with the rise of sedentary agriculture which is permitted to a great extent are to live in the kind of complex collective ways that we do. That we've moved out of this and that humans have become the most important sort of source of environmental change if you like such that it registers at this geological level. And within that, climate change is the most, if you like, visible environmental problem. And professionals working on environment and development need to understand its implications for development trajectories. In the words of Naomi Klein, this changes everything and what she's alluding to there is that in her view, capitalism and the workings of, you know, industrial capitalism and its environmental problems that's given rise to over the last say 200 years, a get into a point where, you know, this is going to cause a crisis in capitalism itself. It cannot, you know, really continue on this basis because the climate is going to disrupt its workings too much. None of them agrees. But this is the question, if you like, at the heart of responding to climate change and development. Clearly, we need to understand and find a better balance within the energy development poverty emissions nexus because climate change is linked to patterns of inequality, which are already established in current development sort of trajectories. If you look, we all have some sense of the gap between rich and poor and not just rich and poor countries, but rich and poor individuals. So there's something about climate change, which exacerbates and interacts with those issues, which makes it a fundamental issue for development practice practitioners to take into account. And of course, dealing with it is essential, this is recognized and dealing with it is essential to the achievement of the sustainable development goals, which I'm sure many of you know is a huge focus for international organizations like the UN, national governments would increasingly be the private sector also. So that's why to study it. And what we're aiming to do with this program is to offer critical insight into how current development models produce environmental problems like but not limited to climate change, which themselves threaten the objectives of development. We want to pose the question of what level of change do we need to confront the problems generated by climate change? Do we need reform or revolution to come back to Naomi Klein's question? To help students develop analytical skills to solve adaptation problems and to identify low carbon development options and to contribute to the production of the next generation of environment and development professionals who are working on climate policy and practice and to provide the most academically gifted students with a route into PhD studies on climate change and development is if that's what you want to do. Okay, what kind of skillsets are you going to acquire if you come to study with us? Well, as you might expect, you'll get some training in research design, project management, analytical and writing skills. These are all at the heart of what we do and of course they're very important transferable skills for many professional contexts that you may already be working in or that you may be looking to work in in the future. We're looking to foster a capacity for reflective independent learning, critical thinking of course, ability to not just understand complex ideas but also to evaluate and interrogate them critically. Part of that is about the communication of complex ideas but there's also other stuff that happens through interaction with your peers and through combining your distance learning studies with other parts of your life. So through the people you might meet on your programs and your modules, you might develop more intercultural awareness and sensitivity. You'll have to be thinking about the flexibility and ability to manage complexity in your own sort of personal arrangements if you like in terms of meeting some of the deadlines you'll have for studies and combining that with the other things that you have on in your lives. There's online networking skills and the ability to analyze and identify the relevance of knowledge acquired through study to real-world climate change and development problems. So on the one hand we are interested in understanding what climate changes, what implications it has for what we think of as development but there's also something very applied and hands-on in a lot of the focus that we bring to the way in which we put the study materials together. So how can you study with us? Well you can do it in a number of ways depending on what best fits you really. Most people go for the Master of Science which basically entails taking four of our modules which adds up to 120 credits plus the dissertation which is an extra 60 credits of work and doing this over a two to three year period. Two years is the minimum you can take to do it. Three years at the moment is the maximum registration period that we have. But there are other ways and I'll come on to I'll flesh that out a little bit in the next slides but I just want to mention briefly the post-grad certificate and the postgraduate diploma. If for example you're in a situation where you already have a Master's in Development Studies or something and you want to top up and show you know from one job say that you're looking for another job where you want to get into an environmental NGO and you want to be the person who brings a climate change sort of relevant knowledge you might find that you can use your existing experience or qualifications and just get yourself a postgraduate certificate which is two modules. So that's 60 credits worth of study and which may demonstrate enough for you to get to the next step in your career progression. I guess it's good to speak to someone like me about which would be the most appropriate model for you but these are some of the options you have. Another one would be I mean you might also use that idea in the context of a postgraduate diploma which you don't do the dissertation but you do demonstrate you have very good postgraduate skills and knowledge in climate change and development and again it just might get you through that a bit more quickly and it might be enough depending on your career path. Just one more thing to say about the postgraduate certificate sometimes we have people who don't quite meet the entry level criteria for SOAS which tends to be you have to have a 2-1 or the GPA equivalent which I think is about 3.2 or 3.3. I'm saying that off the top of my head we'd have to go and check that as the basic sort of level of what you've achieved in your undergraduate studies sometimes if you have really relevant experience we have a lot of people for example already working for the UN you already have a job in climate change and if they have a high 2-2 or you know a good fairly good but not quite their GPA in their grades then we can sometimes consider that as entrance to the MSc program but if you're somewhere below that and it's not clear that you've got the level you know and the track record for studying at postgraduate level and it is more difficult than undergraduate level and if you had some time out it can be even more difficult still. What we can sometimes do is recognize what qualifications and experience you do have and set you off studying for a postgraduate certificate and then if you manage to pass those modules you can be upgraded to start studying with the MSc so that's worth thinking about as well. Depending on the situation you're in when if and when you come to make an application with us. Okay so how does it work? Basically what we do is we have two 16-week study sessions a year one of them starts in October and one of them starts in April and in that time you'll be studying 15 units and each week we suggest that you study a minimum of 15 hours per week of course you can study more than that but that's what it'll take you probably to get through the the module materials that we prepare the study guides and the key readings for sort of each week there's lots more you can go into than that but that's a sort of if you like a minimum which should see you through and get you learning enough to be getting a good performance out of your assessments which I'll come on to. So you will access the key readings and especially written course guides that we have via the virtual learning environment you'll have a dedicated tutor sorry tutor and discussion forum in each module that you study with us you get access to the Starris online library and also to the University of London Library and then you are assessed on a combination of assignments plus exams so the three basic modules of assessment are one of them is actually participation on in our discussion for us so sometimes there are particular exercises and there's a they set up a discussion and you have to contribute to that in order to get some of the marks that go towards your final mark for the module but sometimes you have a situation in which 20 percent of the overall mark for the module rests on participating in 10 out of 15 of the discussion for that we have online the point of this is to make it compulsory to interact with your peers and I have to say that the quality of the interaction that I've seen when we've done this has really been impressive and it is an extra thing to do if you like during the week but I think it's the sort of thing that really repays itself and so that's a quite important and increasingly important part of our assessment and gives you the chance not just to learn through us but through interactions with your peers a group is always cleverer than an individual we also have the you know more standard forms of assessment that you will be more familiar with one of these we call the exam and assignment and it's often some kind of essay and character sometimes it has that in combination with an online discussion element at other times it might even be a PowerPoint presentation or it might be a specific exercise related to the learning objectives of a particular module and it tends to be around 40 to 50 percent of the mark of the module so as I say it can vary in exactly what it is but if it's an essay style one it tends to be about sort of 3000 words and the rest of the mark is from an exam which at the moment is still actually handwritten what you would do is you'd go to one of the University of London's exam centres which they have a network of which stretches right around the world so there will be one in your country or at the very furthest in the adjacent country and but most likely in your country and you go and you sit an exam for for two hours and that's 50 percent of your marks which sounds a little bit sort of 20th century rather than 21st century learning and at some point once the technology is ready we'll hope to switch to people doing exams on their own computers but at the moment that's sort of a component of it which again pedagogically actually for distance learning is something that we feel very strongly about in terms of the narrative exams okay but that's basically how it works let me talk you through the dissertation which is pretty important for setup programs generally the dissertation of course is an element of taking what you've learned and trying to do something with it so hopefully you'll look across your modules and you'll look at some area that you're very interested in and you'll have a good sense of what the debate is in that area what you're really looking to do is make original contribution to that area of debate so you're looking to figure out something that hasn't been said just yet which forms the basis for identifying research questions which would be the basis of your dissertation you could then go and try and answer those through doing desk based research such as a literature review or we have lots of people because of you know they live in places they work for organizations which are research active or which need research doing in particular areas in order to be able to implement the programs that they're working on you can go off and do field-based research and you get research training along the way so this is kind of broken up into four sessions across two years and that's why the minimum you can do one of our programs in is two years if you look at the diagram on the right of the slide it has sort of a sense of how you might spend your time across years one and two so the first if you look at the top right of the circle there's a subject module one that's the first module that you'll study which will be your core module then you'll go on to dissertation study between the two 16 week periods of study before you start your second module you'll start to think about your your your dissertation and you'll be doing that also you know through the the term in which you're actually studying your your second module you'll come to the end there there's there's a bit more dissertation study and by that point you're looking to put together this document here at the bottom of the bullets on the left to call the assessment or the assessed proposal which is a detailed plan of the idea that you want to do and how you know what your questions are and how you propose to answer them with what research that's you propose to do that and by that point you will have been assigned a supervisor who will help you figure some of this stuff out and help you to write you know the assessed proposal and who will mark it so that you get a sense there you'll go on then in the second year to study your modules three and four and between those again there's more time for dissertation study you might use that to do field work for example and then you might from then on be you know mostly working on your your fourth module say if you're on track to complete within a second year and doing a bit on of the dissertation on the side but that then leaves you with an extra six months at the end the really focus on the dissertation itself so that will take you through two years and that's roughly how you would split up your time between module study and the dissertation if you're doing a full master's program with us so what is what would you actually get to study module wise if you take climate change and development so first of all you start with a core module which is climate change and development and then you go to um uh list a where you you take two of these three options so you can study climate change adaptation and low carbon development or energy and development but you have to choose two from list a that gives you one option from list b and you can choose any of the uh the modules which are which are listed there biodiversity conservation development food security and social protection gender and social inequality global environmental change and sustainability political economy etc you can you can see the options for yourselves and there's a mix there importantly of things which are central to development policy and practice and things which are bringing you knowledge of environmental issues and dynamics which are then relevant to uh development policy and practice and um oh someone has uh asked a question the module page it's so i said it online um states uh one this day two times list b yes sorry no that's that's not um hmm okay actually i can't confirm that i thought that it was um um actually maybe you should go with what's actually on the page for now i thought it was the other way around but it may be that you choose one from list a and then you choose uh two from list b so um sorry for the for the mix up there but let's go with what's actually on the website for now i think that's been checked by a couple of people that may be the confusions in in my head that would still leave you with half of your um minimum of half of your um modules for your degree being on climate change and development and if you wanted to say study climate change and development and all of the modules in this day so that you were only really looking at the ones which are most focused on climate change then you could you could um do that uh if you wanted to Sarah does that answer your question well um whilst you're oh yes you do brilliant no you're you're welcome okay so only a couple more slides left and i really need to leave some time for you guys to start speaking so just briefly on where our students are uh located we have a lot of people from europe in fact a majority of people but we have substantial um representation from other places as well at least africa and the americas we've got less in um the middle east less in australia and less in asia although those segments are all sort of gradually growing as as as time goes on and um as you can see we have a sort of as is very typical actually of post graduate education and we have about just on the two thirds of our students are women and just over one third are men so um that's how it works in terms of the the gender split and you can see here on the top uh uh bar chart on on the slide there the you know the different age groups of students across our overall cohort so that gives you some sense of um who is studying with us and at what stage in their lives we have people who come to us um straight after their undergraduate studies or a couple of years after their undergraduate studies or who pick up their studies sometime a little bit later on into their professional career between you know their 30s and their 40s um so that they can get to the next stage we have a mix of both but you can see that generally speaking people come to us um having gone out into the labour market and got a bit of work experience and then coming back to to help them get to the next uh stage and finally some of the people who uh have been employed uh some of the places where our students have gone to be employed afterwards united nations uh international fund for agricultural development well bank care international world health organization so a real spread of sort of um kind of uh international organizations NGOs government organizations um you know all all kinds of different um sort of um places where where people end up but you know clearly there's a there's a sort of very um clear sort of link to to the development uh sector so anyway you might be glad to hear that's everything that i'm i'm going to say let me repeat what i said at the start which is um let's have a discussion now you can all sort of um sort of chip in so i think what i will do is um first of all tell you and remind you that if you want to speak you'll need to click your microphone on which is one of the icons at the bottom of the of the screen looks like a microphone um and before you do that can you please uh raise your hands so that i can see uh when to bring you in so if you have a question uh i see okay so first off we've got uh raman gulda so if you'd like to turn your your microphone off raman gulda sorry turn it on yeah hi hi uh already was applied for this course and i got confirmation from uh u.s.i or m.s.i certificate hello hello yeah yeah sorry you got confirmation of what uh unconditional uh operator i got from u.s.i okay uh just i want to know the uh your scholarships for upload this right so you're looking for scholarships to study with us yeah right okay so i'm going to type um a little bit into the message box as well so it's recorded there there is a so as research scholarships page um but i'm not a hundred percent sure that those scholarships at the moment are applicable for distance learning so yeah regarding this i also mailed to uh your person and he said that as of now there is no scholarships for distance learning hmm right uh uh and just i'm asking is there any alternative to get the scholarships yeah so i mean depending on where you're from um there are a couple so i am from india i am from india right okay so um one of the places that we have in the past had scholarships for and um i don't know if they have an open call where you can apply to to go wherever you want right i know they have scholarships that are linked to particular universities in particular departments and some of the on-campus masters such as the on-campus masters program that i can be as well as this one and that does have a couple of scholarships linked to it okay common well scholarship there if they have an open form you can apply for a study wherever you want that's worth looking at the other one it's all good please continue sure go on please continue continue all right so so the other one is um and this is a great source for everyone it's called the grants register now it isn't on it's recently become an online compendium as well but basically it is a list of all of the grants that you can apply for for study in the uk and i think well it's not i can't refuse to study but it definitely covers and studying and you can it lists all the grants in different ways so it could be according to your nationality so there are some grants for example where you have to be indian for example to apply for and nobody else applies to them or you may have to email or you may have to be a particular um i'd knew ethnic background for example or um you may have to have a background study wise in a particular area or you may be looking to study a particular course and you can search the grants register um now you can do it electronically um to look for any kind of grant that you might be uh eligible for now the thing about the grants register is that i mean i think it's it's not worth going out and buying i think it costs about 250 british pounds but you should find there will be institutions with a subscription and to it so for example in india i imagine that the british council could have a subscription to it and universities and public libraries may also have one okay okay thank you we could also do questions by um you know by messaging so whichever way you want to do it you can raise your hand if you want to speak don't forget to turn your microphone on and uh if you um want to put it in the messaging box i can also pick those up and read them out and we can go from there okay so sara we've got a question from you if planned dissertation topic is based on an elective module which we won't take until the second year is that an issue well um so yes it would be um i mean unless you had prior knowledge of that which you could say okay i know this subject i know where there's a research gap i'm gonna aim to address that then what you'd be looking to do is to take that in your first year if you find that you know you don't know what you want to do your dissertation about in your first year that's not a problem because you have three years overall to complete the program so you can then study your second sorry your third and your fourth modules and you can spend third year um doing the dissertation if you want does that make sense yes okay good you're welcome are the questions any one wanting to raise their hand or um type something uh here we go so somebody else who can't turn their microphone on right now but has some questions on distance learning how flexible is studying i would like to continue working part time during the course so taking part in real-time lectures or forum discussions during the day might be difficult at times um will this be based uh sorry will this be part of the course or is it rather based on recordings um so let's take some of these questions one by one so how flexible studying so you can defer if you don't quite reach the end of a term having finished everything you want to do you can then take it in year two or three if you need to or you can you know if it runs in april and october you can repeat it in october not every module runs in both october and april but quite a lot of them do so if you want to continue working part time during the course that will be fine and there's no taking part in real-time lectures or forum discussions during the day you the the whole premise of distance learning is that it is asynchronous which is that it doesn't all happen at the same time say if there is a forum discussion you have a week in which you can contribute you don't have to like do it at 2 30 p.m on a monday or something like that because of course for people around the world 2 30 p.m on monday will be a very different time so um we do sometimes have webinars like this one which are recorded so you can turn up for it you know at a time like you will have now or you can watch the recording which we are very much hoping other people will do with this one and then our exams also taken online and in test centres so they're not taken online right now you have to go to one of the university of london's test centres and you have to sit the exam physically and sit there and write it we're waiting for the technology to become good enough to do all of this online as it stands now there was somebody who put their hand up and i'm sorry i wasn't able to respond at the time i'm trying to look at the name actually i think it was uh was it a thanus or you're welcome christine was it a lenna or a thanus or somebody then it began with a if you had a question if you want to stick your hand up again i'm very happy for you to say it to us or to write it whichever you prefer a few new chat messages very good if planned dissertation topic ah we've got a few okay let me take these one by one uh so um in terms of learning material what would that be julia i think you have to be a bit more specific with your question i mean in broad times you get a study guide where you'll have 15 units one for every week you'll study plus a week to write your exam and assignment in the middle of that and you get a the study guide has a sort of broad guide to the topic for each um week of study and then you have these key readings which you um read on top of that to dive into and get more detail on the specifics of any particular area that you're studying um so let me know if that doesn't answer your question uh morris um sitting at an examination center and handwriting your exams after 20 years it's pretty ugly yes i think that's a very common um sentiment and we have had long debates about whether to have exams or not and the difficulty with it is that so far the online technology is not good enough for us to be certain that we can eliminate cheating in the way that we can you know eliminate it or at least very much reduce it in exam settings where you're writing by hand and uh exams of course are always are they're not necessarily the most popular of um of assessment formats but they are arguably the best way for us to assess you not just you know in terms of say an essay where you go in depth into one issue but across the breadth of a module to show us that you know not just about what's in unit 15 if that's what you write your essay on but you know something about units one to 14 also um sarah's posted a note to the exam centers so you're probably all ahead of me uh and that's all the questions for now i don't see any hands raised but i think we're up to date so any other questions or um hand raising uh desires okay regarding the entry requirements yeah if you obtained your first degrees in another country than the uk okay so um who can you ask about translating the grade um it it kind of um it depends this might go a little bit beyond my my knowledge of our of our application procedure essentially um there is uh an international body called naryc n a r i c i won't in case i use up some of my precious connection and cut myself off again um naryc is a body which um basically does this active translation and says okay so if you need a two one to study x degree in the uk what is that what is the equivalent of that say in the united states or garner or south korea or china or or whatever so um what we will do is we will look at um at their information and we will make a decision sort of uh based on that so there is a sort of standardized way of doing this and uh we will follow that in the same way that other universities will also use that database does that answer your question christine not sure oh yeah yes partly so the responsibility to deliver the correct information on the grade so what you'll have to provide is your university transcripts you'll have to demonstrate um that you have got a particular grade and then we'll ask for the transcripts so if you ask the university for that if the if those are in english then there's no requirement to translate if they are not in english then there is a requirements to get those translated um yeah i think that's the policy okay so a couple more questions that have come up here um regarding well this is loris's comment um regarding a dissertation loris uh completed in 2014 environmental management and um went more into economics uh the supervisor assigned to me was an economist with a very nice relationship but i was preferred having someone more on the side of my dissertation is the supervisor not selected too early in the process uh okay so i mean that's a quite that's a subjective question i can't give like a an objective answer uh to that the the policy that we we have is to match um whatever you want to do your dissertation on um as with with subject area expertise as much as possible so we'd look to if you want to do your um your dissertation on environmental economics then we would look to get environmental economists to be your supervisor and we do this as much as we can uh obviously what tends to happen is that we are finite in the number of staff that we have and we also have a big database of people who um supervise for us so we can often get pretty close um but it's not always possible to get um a perfect match if you like and you'll that is a uh an issue that you will find in most universities in fact the fact that we have something like 40 odd uh supervisors on our registration uh database means that we have more leeway than than quite a number but of course it's never a sort of a perfect process for everyone so there is or there was a facebook um group especially for SADEP and the SOAS um central folks decided that they wanted a facebook um presence for all of SOAS and not for particular departments so sadly we don't have that anymore but it's out there somewhere and there are people who are signed up to it and uh you might be able to look them up what we can also do is think about um for next time maybe trying to get a student involved who is currently studying can give you a sense of how it is but laurice i can't hear you know i'm afraid i see you you've dropped out of the session and you've come back now whilst you're laurice do you know where the you know that you have to turn your microphone on and that this is the um icon near the bottom of the screen it looks like a sort of old school microphone it is okay right so um laurice you may have to type your question in the meantime i'm going to um take a couple of questions from sarah and then from julia so the course page also strikes the registration period for the university of london is five years um you wouldn't okay so that's a mistake because that's what it used to be but it now has been has come down to three years precisely because we want people to be finishing their studies more quickly and the way in which we've made changes recently is um is allowing that to happen so secondly if you were to move geographically during the course um yes you can change exam centre as well you can do that so julia i would like to ask how fees are going to change for EU students in the second year i'm sorry julia that is that is i don't think anybody knows the answers to that question because we don't know how brexit is in the workout just yet um i i'm afraid i wouldn't be able to tell you i can tell you what the fees are for for now but i can't tell you what they are for um future years i hope they say the same but i i honestly don't know so sarah recently done the course and so far if i have you've seen that sarah that's brilliant quite shocking on the climate change threats we face indeed um laurus will be typing his answer now i'm sorry you couldn't speak to us i'm not sure what the issue is then maybe again there's an issue at my end or something but i certainly can't hear any of you so i think what laurus touches on here is really important um difficult to to graduate while working uh yes there are there are a couple of graduation ceremonies that you can attend um each year but they may only not coincide with or fit with requirements of of work is that is that what you're is that what you're saying laurus okay very academic compared to other friends in different schools but exactly what i was looking for okay sorry you didn't you didn't get me i was just when you're saying that examination was annual which it still is although for modules that run twice in the year um there are two different exam periods now it's been difficult to me graduating whilst working could you just clarify that please laurus oh yeah okay so this is the thing right this is one of the things that we have changed we have more study sessions now um and before it and and basically we have 30 credit modules rather than 15 credit modules so laurus who's been an absolute trooper had to study eight 15 credit modules so there was less work involved per module but there are eight exams then to sit eight examined assignments to complete um it is basically more work and we were told that we were over examining people and that the the burden of work although it conforms the you know the europeans bologna sort of standards it was so far above the sector average that we've streamlined so that people have to do as much studying but it's within shorter terms so before we had 32 week terms now we have 16 week terms and um you'll only set four exams and you'll only do four exam and assignments so um they're longer the examined assignments are longer and you have to study more continuously i mean the the the flexibility of a 32 week term is that you can do it over quite a long period um but it doesn't always help people to finish and it's not always easy then to fit it in if you're doing that over eight modules and that's why it's quite common for our students uh or has been in previous years for them to take four or five years but now as I say we're looking at two to three year periods that that most people will go through with and indeed thank you very much for your response loris i'm afraid i'm going to have to draw it to close now because i'm afraid i've got another meeting to go to um so i just wanted to thank you all very much for all of your participation this session as i say has been recorded so it will be available for you to watch and for anybody else to watch and elka who is our marketing person who has been listening in the background from time to time and will email everybody to um uh to let you know what the way you can find that recording um just to pick up on that at this point there is a lot to read and you need to take seriously those 15 hours per week thank you very much at that is that is exactly the message i want to hear from our government students uh and you can you guys at that as well surely tell you you can do plenty more than 15 hours a week if you really want but uh yeah thank you very much all of you for joining i've really enjoyed our chat albeit that it's been a bit sort of one side at least in terms of people actually physically getting to talk um and uh yes good luck in trying to procure scholarships um yeah no worries about the video i i don't know what that is i think collaborate is still a bit of a work in progress but at least we've got this far and you've got the presentation slides now so um again i'd like to thank once again everyone for their time um wish to wish you all well hoping to get some applications from some of those of you who haven't put them in just yet and for those of you that have uh like Ramon Gouda then congratulations on getting an unconditional offer and thank you very much for joining us at this point and good luck to you Julia okay take care guys oh Athanasia has one last question okay you've caught me just before i leave i've got a meeting to go for too so i have to be quick but yes what's your last question Athanas why can't periodic webinars say why can't we have periodic webinars so it is something that we're looking at um the thing about webinars is that students always say that they want them but the attendance rates tend to be between five to ten percent of the cohort when we organize a webinar so say for example webinar is normally organized in the following way your tutor or your convener comes onto the discussion forum and says let's have a moodle poll let's find some dates that people can do uh now sign up for one and then you get maybe say 20 people signing up and then you often get two or three of those people and that's it so it's something that we we're wondering about how effective that is because it's they're really useful um in lots of ways but it's quite um difficult to get people to sign up for them having said that because we can record them these days um and i think we're starting to get software which gives us some sense of how many people actually listen to the recordings i think you know the case is building so it's it's an ongoing um issue and something that will be sort of coming back to and basically if Anas if you want there to be webinars then make this point but as you have done today very much to your credit um turn up for them and get your peers too also right sorry guys i really do have to run been great to speak to you all um enjoy the rest of your days and uh any questions uh my email is right okay take care guys bye