Lectures and seminars at the University of Birmingham

My course is Social Policy And it's taught through seminars and lectures and lectures are where you just listen to lots of information and I have about 8 – 9 contact hours with that and then I also have seminars which are a chance to discuss or and dissertation meetings which is a chance to have one to one contact time with your tutor and they help you out with any problems you may have. I take Chemical Engineering And the course comprises of about 20+ hours of lectures per week including laboratories and tutorial sessions as well. The structure is basically where you go to lectures you take down notes and the tutorial sessions are sessions where you can ask questions about specific parts of the lectures you don’t understand or parts of the course that you’ve been taught but don’t necessarily understand either And you also have a personal tutor who you meet with like you know I think about twice a term and you have an opportunity to speak to them about any problems that you may be having with the course you know any material that you may not understand, you can actually go to your personal tutor and you can talk with them about anything that you’re finding a bit difficult. My course because I do Mathematics and Psychology but it's 2/3 Maths it’s mainly lectures and example classes so I have about 13 hours of lectures a week two hours of computer labs where you just use Mathematics and computer software and about 3 to 4 hours of example classes where you just talk about problems with postgrads if you’ve got problems with the work and you have to hand in exercises and things like that. My Chemistry course is taught with mostly labs we’ve got about a day and half of labs and about 20 hours a week of lectures. During the course of a year as well we also have tutorials which are smaller group sessions where we talk to the tutors and we get to talk about the course content we get to ask any questions on a one – to – one basis and we just get to interact more with the other students as well. My course is taught with lectures and labs mainly we don’t have many seminars or tutorials I mean they are in the timetables so if you need any of help with any of the theory you can go and sit in and get extra help from PhD students or the course teachers. At the beginning of term we have about 14 contact hours where we have a lot of lectures and we go through theory, through the slides and we have reports for that, for coursework. The way that you’re taught at university is quite different from sixth form because and colleges and things like that because you basically have a few lectures but you also have seminars and lectures are usually your whole course meeting up and just receiving information from one of the lecturers on a particular topic and a seminar is where you meet in small groups and you're asked to kind of discuss the range of ideas you heard about in your lecture and to just go through things in more detail so you get a better idea of what the course is about. At university your timetable will consist of a mixture of lectures and small group teachings which are also known as seminars. Depending on your course the number of people in lectures may vary. For my course we have about 400 people in a big lecture theatre. In small group seminars again depending on your department it varies between ten people to about 20.