 Hi everyone, this is Tom Tanner from Setup. I'm sitting here with Ann Bell De Fries. We're assuming everyone can hear us. Somebody drop us a message to say your hearing is loud and clear. That would be nice, thanks. We're going to talk through this presentation here. We have tried to address some of the questions that people sent in. Anything that comes to you, do drop it into the chat box and we'll try and either answer them as we go along or part of the Q&A at the end and it may be that we've covered some of the things we wanted to ask anyway. Our video order to see us isn't working but we've got little pictures in to show you who we are anyway. Just to let you know, I'm the Program Director for the Climate Change and Development MSC and I'm a reader in Environment Development at SOAS. We are part of Setup which is a Centre for Development, Environment and Policy which is a research centre and teaching centre that sits within the School of Interdisciplinary Studies. Our bigger departmental framework is that School for Interdisciplinary Studies in the same way as the Department for Development Studies, Department for Economics and so on. We're going to run through the presentation and we're going to cover the following formats. We're going to introduce the backgrounds, introduce you to some of our research, academic interests and then talk through the programmes that we offer and consider some of the key elements of the importance of climate change and sustainable development and then run through the Setup programme to give you an idea of how it works and some of the benefits of studying with Setup and then we'll follow with your questions and answers which hopefully we can answer today and if not we'll be able to email you and make sure that you've got all those questions answered. I think we're good to know a little bit about our backgrounds and also the entry points for climate change and sustainability. So I'm one of the epidemics at Setup. I'm probably the one who has the broadest set of experience on working on climate change and development issues including I've specialised on adaptation and resilience but I've worked with the low-carbon development work as well. I offered the textbook for the main climate change and development module here and I'm particularly interested in the politics of the policy process so it fits with us so as ideology quite well to think about this is not just learning about the technical approaches to tackle climate change but actually the politics of the policy process, whose interests, who gets to decide why and how you might navigate those decision-making frameworks. I'm particularly interested in the anticipatory decisions and how can we encourage greater anticipatory decision-making so I've been working recently with the use of early warning systems that are linked to action so forecast based finance as it's known where finance is provided on the basis of a forecast rather than waiting until a disaster happens in order to take action. I'm also working a lot in the cities and urban resilience has become quite a catch-all term for tackling climate shocks and other stresses like security, terrorism and economic shocks so I've been engaged in particular with the Rockefeller Foundation working on urban resilience programming and finally I'm interested in the children and youth that goes back 15 years and it's all the more relevant now and we're reforming that coalition with some of the big international youth-centred NGOs to look at the climate change and youth links particularly around the rise of Greta and others as big activists in the climate change world. Annabelle. So my background, I like time, is very much focused in the educational sector. I've worked in Birkbeck, I've worked at CEDF for about 12 years now as a computer and I've also worked at UCL and City University but all my work has really been centered around sustainable development and specifically issues of food and gender. Particularly the sustainable development 2030 agenda hinges very much on food, its production, its distribution and the social, economic and environmental systems that drive and shape the food system both regionally, locally and globally and my interests really lie in how those processes impact people and their health and the environment and the livelihoods they can derive from the food system. So that goes all the way through the value chain from production to distribution to processing and consumption. So my recent work combines ideas of the food system and sustainable development and I've been involved with an organisation called ISTA which is the Interdisciplinary Food Systems Teaching and Learning programme and that really works to cut across many of the themes that you find in the sustainable development programme, for example discussions of poverty and market access, transport, environmental challenges, degradation, resource management and also ideas of concept of inequality as well within different scenarios and my area particularly within the food system. Connected to this is one of my interests in pedagogy and specifically interdisciplinary pedagogy which tries to consider the benefits of bringing together different disciplines in trying to tackle the complex problems that are characteristic of the food system and that is the complex environmental feedback loops that we find across the globe and also complexity in terms of inequality within the food system. So food systems that are reliant on migrant workers, for example or are reliant on degrading the environment but at the same time with local livelihoods dependent on those environments. So one of the issues recently has been an increasing need to work as disciplines to find sort of complex solutions to these important issues. So they kind of go together quite nicely and I think cut across a lot of the themes that we offer on our modules both within the sustainable development programme and the climate change. My other interests are to do with gendered construction of the environment which goes back to my PhD work which looked at mill per farmers in Mexico and also political economy and cultures of food around the organisation of co-operatives where I did some work for the FAO. So one of the questions you're asking yourselves probably is why you should be studying these masters from the perspective of the topic itself and you will all recognise that there's much greater awareness in the last five years and even in the last year of climate change and sustainability as key issues and we've seen much greater levels of activism globally. We've seen since the Paris Agreement of 2015 we've seen much greater levels of international interest in climate change and that is varied internationally so I think there's more in the global north in the west there's greater interest in climate change and greater pressure from the public where there may be less so in the global south but there's a growing realisation in the global south that the environmental constraints that climate change and other environmental stresses are putting on the development process through the pernicious slow onset events like salamization of soils for example and the kind of more rapid onset disaster events that we're familiar with too. But I think one reason for studying this is to take the optimistic view and say well this is a way to train and work in a sector which is actually about the opportunities for taking action and that's about pursuing sustainable development goals and growth agendas equity, poverty reduction can all be acted on whilst taking into account climate change low carbon climate change and adapting to those impacts. So while we don't focus the programme on sustainable development goals in the way that some others might, they are the backdrop for a lot of what we are doing and there is job markets increasingly focused on climate sustainability issues both in the kind of aid world, development cooperation but also we see much greater private sector and government agendas that are centering on climate change sustainability. So why study it so deep and so us? Well we've got over two decades of experience of this learning the distanced learning programme began in Y over 20 years ago and were first rolled out as correspondence courses where you had the traditional big pack of papers and learning materials sent to you and you sent your written essays back to professors and doctors where they would mark them and send them back to you. So then it was a very new way of learning which is where FEDEP began part of the University of London and we're one of the first to do that along with open universities. So we've carried on that tradition and well over time now being completely online and having all reading materials available online and all the readings and library access is available to our 500 plus active students. So we've got a wide network of students that come from a variety of backgrounds you'll be quite comfortable to find engineers and soil scientists alongside people who work in politics and the UN, local NGOs, teachers private businesses all the way through in your interactions with your fellow students and it's such a wide rich resource actually of knowledge and information that seems to be there as well. We've also got a wide network of specialist dissertation supervisors which means that when you come to your dissertation we handpick our supervisors and according to the subjects the topic forms that you hand in and your interests so that they can guide you through your dissertation and you have a one-on-one relationship with that supervisor all the way through to the completion of your draft and final submission and we've also got quite a good history of our expertise linking the environment and development as I say over 20 years based in Y College which was part of the University of London it was an agricultural college and has specialised in environment and development for that amount of time and we continue to add our staff which have a broad range of specialisms across those fields so us is also committed to diversifying and decolonising the curriculum and so being part of this all our modules go through a process of making sure that what we are teaching is diverse and uses voices from all over the world and it's a particular connection to power hierarchy is within those particular discourses of that subject so that we're really very keen on ensuring inclusiveness and diversity right through all our learning materials and readings that you are given and of course we're part of the University of London International Programs which is a widely recognised programme of higher education so the distance learning approach provides a way of utilising your own professional knowledge and gaining more academic knowledge and skills for your own career advancement you can work around your employment and family commitments most of our students are working full time and can continue with their studies many of which complete within two or three years so this is really good for families and parents and of course you get an internationally recognised set of qualifications whilst studying in your own country you don't need to travel live and work in the UK and so therefore we have a diverse global student community and this allows you to save your money spread the costs across the modules that you take you pay for each module as you go so there's no massive outlay at the beginning so terms of value for money so professional networking that you can take part in on our discussion forums and your student groups has proven to be very invaluable to many students that study with us that's partly because I'll say exactly how many but certainly more than half of the students' programmes tend to have significant professional experience already and they're looking for the academic side others are looking to transition into the field and others have done an undergraduate course that's related but they want some further training to be able to take that career further now our learning approach in terms of how our pedagogy of how we deliver the distance learning is that there is a set of core teaching materials so each module is divided into somewhere between 12 and 15 units and each unit will have a set of core materials that are written text on PDFs and some online exercises to help you test your own knowledge along with core readings and additional reading lists there's then an online discussion forum where a lot of their thought and debate and discussion which is moderated by tutors who guide you through that work every week and set your questions for discussion so the amount of participation is up to you on those forums where a lot of people get a lot of the added value from these courses because it's about learning from each other as much as it's learning from books and articles there's a mix of formative and summative assessments so some of the assessment work is to help you develop the skills and knowledge as you go through in order to prepare yourself for the final essays and exams the exam which happens at the end of each module we are phasing out exams which is good news for many people who don't like them but bad news for some people who prefer to learn through exams but there will be more coursework based approach starting in October next year but as it is most of the assessment is done through an exam so normally a particular cent then an essay or policy brief during the module an early critical reflection and feedback where you take a piece of writing and summarise it critically and then that is then reviewed by your peers by other students in your module and that's a way of helping you access the library helping you understand how to summarise critically how to reference and there's also a proportion of the mark that's for your participation in the online forum so we expect a minimum level of participation also so when we run our programmes that you have a choice of three qualifications in each of those programmes with climate change and development and assessment programmes so the MSc requires you to take one course and three elective modules and finally a dissertation and this takes around two to five years and some people complete it less to gain a postgraduate diploma you will take the core module plus three electives so of course you get the dissertation as part of this and for a postgraduate certificate requires one core module and one elective module so that one takes between one to five years we are interested in people who would like to continue studying with us and how to get into the UPHBs and we look at that on an incidental basis for a student and it can depend on whether you can find a supervisor that you want to take but it's important to recognise that the MSc is not qualified it's not counted towards the HB qualification which will be an extra minimum three years on your MSc but in many cases the MSc is a requirement to gain your PhD giving trouble hearing Lacey make sure to talk can we just see if anybody can hear us first by typing anything okay we'll try coming closer to the mic okay so the other thing to note on this is that the minimum time you can complete a MSc in its two years and the other thing that you haven't made clear on there is that you can start with a certificate I mean you can register to a postgraduate certificate or a diploma certainly a certificate and then you can complete the modules and if you're happy with them and you've passed them then you can scale up and add those to an MSc by taking further modules and dissertation the one issue of course is that the dissertation process occurs in a cycle of two years so to complete that you do need to do a minimum of two years in completing dissertation windows so we'll talk about that now and how it actually runs but it certainly is a very good idea for many of us students that haven't been in education for a long time and are concerned that okay I'm going to talk a little bit closer because it's slightly near Tom having people who are a little bit concerned that they haven't been in academia for a while it's always a nice way to bring yourself into it and see how it goes So a little on the structure of the module I think you might have seen this on the structure tab under each of the program pages which are linked to the earlier titles the earlier slide but essentially each year there are two subject module sessions and dissertation study happens in between those so each of those sessions takes 60 weeks in total and then in between there's a six to eight week dissertation period which is where you'll work on initially your idea for your dissertation your proposed idea then you'll work up an assessed proposal which is a proposal for what research you want to do and a literature review and that's assessed and becomes part of the mark for the dissertation, the final mark then in the third session third window you'd be expected to do the research itself for the dissertation and in the final window write it up so it can happen within two years but you've got five years that you're allowed to enroll so many students try and get through the modules but some take longer with the dissertations and fend for practice because people need a break every now and again so this just really outlines the choices of modules that you've got I showed you which ones are core and which ones are elective both programs have one core you'll notice with climate change and development those are separate the electives are separated into two lists so you must choose between one and three in the first list, in list A and up to two lists up to two modules can be chosen in list B with the sustainability of development any of those electives can be chosen as part of that program Yes, we run those elective modules to a calendar so the core modules are run every six months so you can start the program either in October or in April and the electives run essentially every other so one will run in the April session and another will be in the October session so there's plenty to choose from and we're also expanding that offer with the ability to take modules from other departments and so as so we're currently working on currently we're offering the Centre for International Security and Diplomacy departments, online modules around global public policy and critical human security but we're also looking at the development studies department here is spinning up online master's courses too so module sharing is on our horizon so that's enough from us does anyone got any questions that we haven't covered that they'd like to type in and we can respond to I'm not sure if we've got a mutual mic so we could possibly hear you people are typing so that's fine oh that's a good question how many, what percentage of people achieve the MSC in two years it's hard to say because they haven't been running for that many years so we're in the third year of the climate change and development MSC and we're in the second year of the sustainable development MSC in the first year of the 17 who joined in the first year I think five graduated in two years so we just had them we just had them graduate at the exam board where they officially graduate so it's hard to say how many I do do it in two years because we haven't got the track record can you pause the program well you have five years from when you register and you're allowed to pause within those five years that gives you the flexibility to take modules and you can defer the dissertation process to say I'll do the fourth stage in the next window or the next window so yes you can take whatever modules you want but you need to complete within five years that you register just this conversion of low income neighbours to solar renewable well the energy and development and the low carbon development courses will be appropriate for that Andrew Smith you're interested in low income neighbourhoods to solar and renewables you can take those options on either but if you want to set them within the context of broader climate change policy then I would take the climate change MSC and if you're thinking that as part of the more broad sustainability frame that sustainable development one would be more appropriate you can do the modules first and then the dissertation to survive your limit but the dissertation yes you can you can take two years to do the modules and two years to do the dissertation and indeed you can sign up to just do the PG dip in that process and then you could see if you don't want to do the dissertation at the end then you could just leave with a diploma which is essentially the same requirements but not including the dissertation and Tom's asking who said that students have access to wider source resources as distance learners in terms of physical space no the answer is because all the resources are available online although online we do have so as bulletins and we do have a programme area where we increasingly sharing things of interest that are happening you know in so as and also according to our own interests related to the courses but in terms of workspace and events unless it's public then there's no specific access to distance learners you've asked for clarity that if you yes the answer is yes if you start on the PG certificate level as long as you complete those a decent degree and pass them then yes you can upgrade to the MSc level by doing the extra electives and the dissertation if you can postpone this entry to the programme after you've been accepted yes I think for one year and maybe one year and a half you'd have to confirm with registry I know if it's two years if you postpone for two years you have to re-apply but that's not normally a problem in fact if you re-apply if you defer and then your offer runs out as it were you just re-apply and it will come up it will come up that you've previously had an offer so that will be sent to the decision makers who are actually Annabelle and I for acceptance on the course and we'll see that you've previously had an offer already so yes it lasts a while Is it okay to build on or use someone's dissertation topic but a more focused choice of your country well part the dissertation is really about producing something that's original so you would pick the original set part by it being focused on a particular country but I think using someone else's topic I think we would have to determine how close it was to that dissertation we'd expect to come up with something that's their own work and certainly in any research or dissertation there are elements at the end of those dissertations which gives ideas for further research so you can certainly build on somebody's work there's nothing to say you can't do that so I hope that answers your question Obviously it's important that it's not plagiarised so it needs to be entirely your own writing and that's that we have software to look at the plagiarism levels as well which you can be familiar with so yeah it's important that it is an original piece of work Lacey who I think is just left will the electives like Human and Critical Security and Global Citizenship and advocacy be available on the MSc's standard relevant yes from the regulations starting in 2020 so from October we are now free to offer anything from our sister departments but we're making an informed decision in the next few months about which of those things we want to offer that are coherent with our programme there's a question about can you take exams in one fixed location no you can take each module you can take the exams at an exam centre in a different country so if you move around it's fine you just have to work out where you are you basically sign up you register to take the exam for that module through the University of London the University of London the University of London they send you a link oh yeah deadlines deadlines on assignments they're set so the deadlines for assignments are set at midnight UK time for a particular date so that's that's how you deal with it it's midnight whatever the time in your time zone is then the best way around that is to submit early the exams occur at the same time in the respective countries so 10 o'clock wherever you are or 2pm wherever you are yes when an exam the question about when an exam isn't suitable there's not much we can do about it other than take that exam in the next cycle so we put the exam timetable out early so you can see when it is there's someone unfortunately on one of my people getting married after her exam she's just deferring and taking it when it next runs in the next cycle that is one of the problems with exams and that's one of the reasons we are moving away from them oh yes that was a question Michael can you take a module from list B before taking one from list A now that's unusual but the answer is yes you can you can take something from the list B on the climate change course before taking a list A option but just don't have to take one from option A because we're looking to stream that as being a specific climate change masters any disruptions or risks because of Brexit not that we know of that shouldn't really affect us we're not one of the main disruptions that was likely that's seen as likely from the universities is around visas and we doubt that with the distance learning program we don't rely on visas hi do we offer admission for Mfills that's a good question normally we don't have an Mfills program in set up that's normally an offer an award that's given for people who do a PhD program but don't finish it so we don't have a specific Mfills track thanks all any final questions do type them in otherwise thanks a lot for joining really appreciate it