Quartile 4

BAU Studio 2 starts with choosing a project, because in BAU Studio 2 you follow one project instead of three. Apart from the location on the Heistraat and Bloemenplein the three projects are completely separate. In the A project students design student housing along with some hand drawing and urbanism assignments. The B project also assigns students to design student housing but this time take all BPS and SED parts that come with it into account. For the U project the students come up with a way to improve healthy living in the dedicated neighbourhood.

The Blue button software was not the optimal way for lectures/meetings for the B project. Just using Microsoft teams might have been a better alternative for the students. Also for the B-project it was sometimes unclear to which level of detail should be thought about, since this wasn’t specified in the study guide. The study guide of the U-project also could have been a bit more specific, because sometimes this lead to confusion. For the A project it sometimes felt like the assignments didn’t match the rest of the project. For the rest everything was well executed.

At the end of each project students would get a final grade and some feedback. There were also some grades in-between where students would get some extra feedback. This was a good system and worked well. Only the A-project sometimes lacked good feedback, especially for the urbanism assignment, with which students could continue their project.

Overall the workload was very well distributed for all three projects, and projects had a fair amount of workload compared to the amount of ECTS.

The course was organised via one canvas page. Which sometimes led to all students being invited for a meeting which was meant for only B-project students, or all students being reminded of a hand drawing deadline that only A-project students had to hand in.

The studyguide is divided in two parts: a general studyguide(A) and one for the assignment(B).
The general studyguide(A) contains a lot of information about the course. It shows for example a clear planning, information about the examinations and other general information. It also shows which books to buy. But because CHEOPS didn’t receive these books to put on their list of books to buy, a lot of students did not have the books.
The studyguide for the assignment(B) was a lot more complicated. The two studyguides itself were named as “A” and “B”, but within studyguide B they also spoke of part “A” and “B”. Together with the confusing explanation of the assignment was this studyguide pretty hard to read.

The whole course is divided in two parts: the history part and the ethics part. The lectures were for both parts really good. The teachers were enthusiastic which made the presentations more interesting. The idea to have a dialogue with the students during the lecture was nice and even though there wasn’t always much response from the students, it was interesting to hear those different ideas.

Lecture quality and quantity was seen as good by students, and complementary to the progress of the assignment. Students were supported each week in a tutor session in which they were encouraged to give group feedback. This was seen as useful, but a heavier weigh in of the professors/tutors would have been appreciated by some students.

The assignments for both parts had their flaws. For the first assignment about the historical analysis, it was for students not clear in which group they were, what their assignment was about and where/when they had to attend the tutor hours. Also the planning could be better. In the first two weeks it was unclear we even had an assignment and at the first tutorial we already had to have read a lot of articles and chose a research question. This was for a lot of students unclear. For the poster we had to make, was it ambiguous what the poster should be about. Whether we had to present our research and how we found our results or explain what our case was and what our results were.
In general you could say that there was a lack of clear information. A better communication between students and teachers would have clarified a lot of issues. A last point is about the wide scale of USE. Because USE is giving on a very broad scale with many different teachers, it was sometimes difficult to be on the same page. The assignment was interpreted in many ways by the students. This created a lot of confusion among the students. For example, in studyguide B, at week 2, point 2a. Here is asked to give two past challenges and later at 2b is asked for two future challenges. However, point 6-2 states that there are only 2 challenges per category.

The examination consists of three parts. First the online weekly tests. These were not that hard, as you could use the book for help. It was a good way to check whether you understood the chapters. Because the questions looked a lot like the ones on the final exam, it was a good preparation. It would have been nice to have a timer next to the questions, because it wasn’t clear how much time you had left.
The second part of the grade was from the assignment. This grade was made of the grades of both the assignments you had to make, which were again divided in two separate grades: one for your work as a group and for your individual part. This was done to make sure each student got the grade they deserved.
At last is the final exam. It consisted of multiple choice questions which were doable, because of the weekly quizzes.