Meeting Notes October 20

Present: Rachel Wilson, Adrian Miles, Jeremy Parker, Cathy Greenfield, Karen Trist.

Presented the program proposal as it has gone to college and Building One. The major differences to what has been discussed and modelled to date:

1. will share research methods with existing subjects, but we have enough students to run our own tutorial cohort, so 2 hour workshop, not 3
2. labs must have 15 students
3. scaled down numbers for beginning, so 30 COG and 5 ION places
4. individual supervision for semester two only

If the program grows, then a final total enrolment of 45 has received support from within the School, which would also mean three labs. In terms of delivery cost, the program is predicted to lose the School around $140,000 per year. (Back of spreadsheet calculations with the financial analyst indicated B.Comm honours and Creative Media honours lose a combined $650,000 a year at the moment.)

Discussion then turned to the labs and the implications of only having two. In a nuthsell we recognised that:

• with only two labs having research themes seems problematic, as it is one thing to have four overall themes that reflect the school’s research agenda, but only two means it can’t reflect that
• the labs could still have a theme but these could more easily change from year to year
• first semester labs could be about the theme, about that topic domain and learning about it (as you need this to be able to frame a viable research proposition around it)
• while second semester labs could be reconsidered in terms of practice – how and what students are making, where there might be one lab dedicated to the sorts of research practices that revolve around writing, or theses, and a second one dedicated to project and exegesis work
• this reflects the 24 credit point that is now allocated to labs in semester 2 (done to enable a part time enrolment structure)

Problems arise though if enrolments increase and we have three labs, but of course the simple dichotomy between two types of labs might change with more students as well. This requires a lot of discussion and thinking about, as it does need to be nailed down shortly.