Teaching Approaches & Facilities

TEACHING STYLES
At Lancaster traditional lectures are complemented by innovative approaches exploiting group based learning techniques often supported by computer systems. The high quality of our teaching has been recognised by a number of University awards, and several members of staff have won University grants to develop innovative approaches to teaching.

IN OUR LAST PERIODIC QUALITY REVIEW WE WERE AWARDED THE HIGHEST POSSIBLE RATING.

FACILITIES

Lancaster has one of the most advanced communications networks of UK universities. A multigigabit core infrastructure interconnects the campus laboratories, offices and public spaces, and offsite connectivity to the rest of the world will soon be upgraded to 10 Gigabits per second as Lancaster implements its key role in the country-wide SuperJANET5 and UKLight academic networks. Lancaster also runs its own metropolitan area network (CLEO), providing network support for over 1000 schools and colleges in the North West of England. Moreover, Lancaster has recently become the only UK University with a telecommunications licence, and soon plans to use this to provide its own DSL connectivity to staff and student homes alike in the Lancashire and Cumbria region. Furthermore, with Computer Science students granted dedicated 24 hour access to two recently upgraded 40 seat Computer Science laboratories, a choice of two campus wide 802.11a/b/g wireless networks, Ethernet connectivity to all student rooms and a high performance computing cluster of 103 dual-processor Sun-Blade workstations, you'll never feel short of resources!

We encourage students to use their own computers, and we provide free copies of some of the software used in our courses. All on-campus student rooms have network points, and there is 24-hour access to the Department's undergraduate labs.

All of the lecture theatres used by Computing at Lancaster have audio-visual facilities, which provide network access and can project video output from computer workstations. These facilities are used extensively in the teaching of computing courses and most of the presented material is also available to students on-line. The Departmental Intranet allows students to download lecture notes across the network and review these at their own pace.

PRACTICAL WORK AND PROJECTS

The Computing courses at Lancaster have a practical focus with students encouraged to put the lessons of the lecture room into practice in the laboratory. We pay particular attention to practical project work throughout the course with nearly one-third of assessment based on practical exercises. These range from programming exercises to group design projects.
To encourage the development of communication and presentation skills, students present their work in written, oral and poster form, both individually and in groups. During the first and second years, formal laboratory sessions are organised where dedicated specialised support is available to students as they are developing and debugging programs. In the third (and fourth) year, students are expected to work on their own with supervisors assigned to advise on matters of design and direction.