Tracing University of London violations of its own policies, agreements, etc.

About this project

Last updated: February 18, 2021

This project is maintained by current students of Goldsmiths, University of London BSc ‘Computing and information systems’ and BSc ‘Creative computing’ international online programs (CIS/CC, for short). We are tracing university administration violations of their own policies, agreements and common sense expectations.

The reason for creating this project is the current situation with CIS/CC programs. A few years ago CIS/CC were average quality distance/online programs, generally worth time and money the students had spent on them.

This situation changed radically in 2020. Rapid deterioration of CIS/CC programs quality started with an attempt of UOL to impose invasive online proctoring system for 2019-20 academic year exams. Later, in September 2020 CIS/CC programs were closed for new applicants and the maximum registration period for remaining students was decreased.

In 2019 UOL started BSc Computer Science program at Coursera. This new program is approx. 2x times more expensive than CIS/CC. In September 2020 CIS/CC students were advised to switch to the new program. They were given 1 week to figure everything out, get the answers from the UOL and make a decision about their further education.

The new 2020-21 academic year has brought some new violations of UOL policies and agreements between the university and CIS/CC students (see list of cases). During the discussion of these matters at ‘Student Cafe’ forum Dr. Maggie Cooper, Programmes Director advised us to follow the official complaint procedure.

Being aware of the complaint procedure we at the same time are sceptical about the ability of this approach to resolve current situation (e.g. it was not enough to stop invasive online proctoring during previous exams). Since the complaint procedure is not very effective, we decided to create this project as the public incentive for the university to straighten its course of action.

We are planning to employ both official complaint procedure and this project pages (and, possibly, other approaches, too) in order to resolve the described problems.

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