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Marcelle (Lecturer): All Lecturers are required to have scheduled in, whether its two hours
a week, an appointment time where they are free to see students and give them academic
counselling.
Alan (Lecturer): Every one of us in the Faculty of Business and Law will have a timetable
on our door and on that timetable you’ll see the hours we are teaching but also you
see the single consultation hours. Each one of us has to put at least five hours of consultation
on the door. Now in amongst all of our timetable we are going to meetings, we are going to
be attending seminars, we are going to be working on research, we are going to be working
on marketing, and we are going to be working on preparation.
We do a lot in our workweek as well and unfortunately we can’t just have a constant flow of people
knocking on the door, interrupting us. So we allocate those contact hours. If you come
and knock on our door in those contact hours you will get our undivided attention. If you
knock on our door when we are trying to get a journal article completed or we are trying
to work on some marking, you might get a short answer. So stick to our consultation hours
and you will always be welcome.
Yasuko (Mature Age Student): I just go there and knock [on] the door, or if I couldn’t
catch them [I] just send an email and then make a booking to see him or her….
Philip (School Leaver): Email is the best way to contact a lecturer because they're
often really busy; if you try and call them they will be out of their office. Or they
may be out on a field study but they are always checking their email. Email is the first port
of call, always.
Alan (Lecturer): Use your student email and immediately I know it’s a legitimate email
from a student in the university and it will get, paid attention to. Things like Hotmail,
Gmail and other accounts, if a student tries to send me an assignment for example, the
filtering systems on the University email will often strip out the assignment or even
block the whole email and I never know it came or, you have no idea whether I received
it. If you use your student email I always get it, it always gets paid attention to.
Marcelle (Lecturer): I think what’s really important too, with University is often secondary
teachers might double up on being, you know, the high school teacher, the social worker,
the careers worker, whereas at University academics are not there in a sense to personally
council students with emotional needs. So it is really important too, as a new student,
that new students are aware of the range of services that are available to them, and the
right people that they need to see for the right kind of need, and University lecturers
are there primarily for academic counselling only. So that’s a really important point:
knowing who to go to. And there's a range of resources - the VU website has a range
of resources at hand - with information about who you can see with a particular kind of
need.