Frequently asked questions

• Where are the recordings and streams?

  You are informed about the location of the streams and/or recordings, if any, within the individual courses and/or in the standard location at video1.fit.vutbr.cz.

• Why is it taking so long to release the recordings?
  Why, if this is a frequently cited problem, is nothing being done about it?

  The recordings are a voluntary activity of teaching colleagues, and FIT supports them technically but not as an essential or even mandatory part of the teaching process. At FIT BUT, we have (exclusively) full-time study; thus, students are expected to attend classes and lectures. We consider recordings (and also streaming) to be particularly useful for situations such as student illness, an emergency such as a pandemic, in short for extraordinary student absences. For these purposes, the publication of recordings ″additionally″ will certainly suffice. Nevertheless, we are trying to prepare the recordings more quickly than before. We have hired an additional staff member to do so. By the way, we do not have an obligation for teachers to ″be recorded and/or streamed″, and legally we cannot introduce it, except for example, in an emergency, when the Civil Code allows the employer to order employees to transmit and record videos.

• Isn't it possible to publish a provisional recording and then replace it?

  Why can't the ″raw recordings″ be published? The voluntarily recorded staff/teacher publishes the recordings. It is not reasonable to publish or allow the publication of unchecked recordings because it might breach GDPR or copyright law. This is because, under the current regulations, the recorded teacher/staff member must publish the recording themselves. And the processing of the recordings determines, among other things, who that person is for the given recording (moreover, the recording could show a person other than the worker/teacher themselves). As a reminder, teachers are under no obligation to make or publish recordings, and we have no plans to introduce such an obligation (nor can we).

• What is the reason for NOT streaming lectures?

  The phrasing of this question suggests that perhaps the lectures should somehow ″be streamed″. That is not the case. At FIT, we have exclusively full-time study, and streaming is a completely voluntary and unenforceable activity of staff/teachers and FIT. If you wish a course to be streamed when it is not, a polite request can be made to the teacher. If he/she is in favour of it, fine. If not, you will have no choice but to ″normally″ (quite standardly) attend classes. By the way, based on the current wording of the Higher Education Act, we are not even allowed (under normal circumstances) to use elements of distance learning in full-time degree programmes.

• The ban on entry with symptoms of the disease increases the number of people who cannot come. At the same time, not everything is streamed.

  That's right. At present, (based on the ongoing pandemic threat) is actually prohibited the entry of people with symptoms of respiratory diseases. At the same time, it is also the case (see other questions) that streaming lectures or recording them are voluntary on the part of the lecturers. This is indeed a problem, yet streaming lectures cannot be mandated. You can ask the teacher to stream, but he or she may not actually comply.
  Moreover, recordings and streams are not the only way to make up for missed material. Presentations from lectures are quite commonly available, and sometimes the material can be found in the study support material. There are a number of books in the FIT library that supports the course taught, and you can ask classmates for help (they will thoroughly review the material during it). There are also many resources on the Internet, and even then, if a student has specific uncertainties, he or she can take advantage of consultations. Self-study is, of course, more demanding, but the student strengthens other competencies that are useful in practice.

• At the lecture, I counted the frequency of coughing per minute and came to about 5. Isn't it possible to speed up access to recordings or streams?

  It is certainly possible to improve it, and we are doing that. See also the answers to the questions above, but neither the recordings nor the streaming can be enforced. There is a ban on attending lectures with symptoms of respiratory illness, and please, if you find a breach of this regulation, warn colleagues that they are ill and should go home. It's a problem, but health takes precedence (even over studying).

• Why are students often blocked from accessing recordings from previous years, and only those who were enrolled in the course that year have access to them?

  The wording of the question is quite surprising. There is no entitlement to the recordings, it is a voluntary activity of the teachers, and it is entirely up to them to who they release the recordings and who they don't. By the way, the substance of courses changes between years, though not 100%, and very often, it makes little sense for students to keep track of ″last years or older″ recordings. Perhaps it would be more appropriate to talk about ″non-disclosure″ rather than blocking.

Number of students

• Don't we have too many freshmen?

  No, we don't. The number of students admitted does not change much from year to year. Students with increasing aptitude (SCIO results) are entering. Moreover, this year the real number of students is more likely to decrease because the admitted Russian, Belarusian and Ukrainian students have a big problem starting their studies in real terms.

Courses

• Is it possible to introduce a course dedicated to optimization? It would be quite useful within the field of artificial intelligence and other disciplines and is standard in other universities.

  Generally speaking, it is possible, and the board of the degree programme decides about the courses. This requires a proposal and inclusion in the degree programme.

• Will there be a course including Rust taught at FIT anytime soon?

  Some of colleagues may include it. It is an interesting language, relatively new, and has a lot of growth, we have people who program in it and have experience, but we need to give these people a place to teach it - see seminars on Java, C++, C#, VHDL... You're not the first to ask, this reasoning has been floating around, and we're trying to figure it out, but it's not a ″you want, we'd like″ thing. It's more complicated... But it's a work in progress.

Materials/IS

• Course materials - is there any way to unify where course materials and information are stored - perhaps in Moodle?

  The availability and existence of course materials is a matter for the course guarantor. This will likely converge to ″Moodle″ naturally over time. Still, a uniform method or the existence of any particular type of materials cannot be directly mandated precisely because it is the responsibility of the course guarantors. There is, however, a recommendation from the Dean's Collegium for uniform storage of learning materials.

• Would it be possible to arrange for all courses to have scripts? That way, students would have information about the topics taught without having to wait several weeks for a recordings.

  This question is indeed oddly phrased and suggests that perhaps the script and records should be the standard requisite for courses. However, this is not the case. The primary source of course information and inspiration for students is the lectures they are expected to attend. Still, the course content is primarily for students to study on their own, not only from the lectures but also from other sources such as books and articles recommended in the course and/or that students find on their own. In some courses there are additional materials, for example similar to scripts, but this is really ″ad hoc″ according to the possibilities and needs in each course. Nor are the recordings mandatory or entitlement. So don't wait for the recordings. Go to the lectures, look for materials, and study independently.

Questionnaires

• Would it be possible to make the Courses rating module available to students during the semester so we can complete questionnaires on an ongoing basis?

  We would like to allow this, at least on some issues, and we are trying to outsource this to CIS. So it also requires minor legislative changes. But this is a more extensive technical problem. The current implementation of the questionnaires is done with an emphasis on anonymity, which is also a right. It does not allow changes to be made to a questionnaire that has already been filled in because it cannot be linked to the person who filled it in. Theoretically, a randomly generated key could be stored in the questionnaire, which the student could save, and access through it to edit. Still, there is currently no capacity to implement this change (priorities are different, and we are now struggling to get questionnaire results at all for inter-faculty teaching).

• Would it be possible to keep the course evaluation module open for at least a month after the exam period (summer semester)?

  Sorry, this would not work as we have set times to process the report and teacher responses. Even so, sometimes, we miss deadlines.

HW courses

• Why are lectures and exercises of HW courses uninterrupted for 4 hours?

  4 hours without interruption is undoubtedly a problem. Please make arrangements with the teachers. It is possible to understand if there is a 2-hour lecture by appointment with students without a break, but 4 hours is too much.

Graduation

• Classmates from other universities have free graduation with photos. Why isn't this possible here, and why aren't photos shared digitally?

  According to the information we have from FI MUNI, the graduates pay for the photos. This year they had two options, electronically and classically. They pay for electronic photos too. The same at FP BUT, where you pay 600 CZK right away and the next day you get a link to the photos. At PF MUNI they said that they don't pay for photos, but they pay for graduations (i.e. all in one). At Mendelu they also pay for photos. Generally speaking, there is nothing free in the world. I mean, someone has to pay the photographer. It may not be clear, but somewhere graduates pay a higher fee for graduation. So it's possible to pay a photographer out of that. But then the students lose the choice, so they always pay for the photos, even if they don't want them.

Feedback

• Would it be possible to communicate what has changed for the better more comprehensively? This way it seems like nothing is moving, but some things are changing based on feedbacks as well.

  Sorry, but it would be too difficult to compile a comprehensive report on what we are doing and what we are changing. But you can certainly follow the Newsletter and/or the minutes of the Dean's College, for example, or other bodies that the Faculty has, or you can certainly look at the Annual Report. There you can learn about changes and progress.

Catering

• Does the Ventana Café have a monopoly on vending machines at the faculty? Seeing a little competition for vending machine vendors as a customer would be nice.

  Ventana at FIT operates ″just″ a cafe for the reason you describe. The vending machines have another operator who competes with Ventana.

• A water dispenser in the D complex to the largest auditoriums?

  We're thinking about that too. Just please, these suggestions cannot be ″worked with without limitations″. The cost of operating the current dispenser ″E″ is about 180 thousand CZK per year. Is it economical to purchase another one about 50 m away?

Schedules

• Would it not be possible to compose the schedules of compulsory subjects so that they are in more compact units? I understand this is complicated, but the resulting schedules are unusable.

  We make the schedule as best we can. It probably won't suit everyone ideally, but I don't understand the ″unusable″ comment. We have (almost) no conflicts in the schedule, and if you have longer breaks in the schedule, you can certainly make good use of them to study in one of the spaces at FIT. (If space is tight, we are prepared to offer more.)

• UPA - would it be possible to do a demonstration exercise any other time than Friday at 6 pm? I confess that despite the teacher's best efforts, it is entirely unmanageable.

  The 6 pm Friday schedule is a pretty regular schedule time. We understand that Friday evening is an ″unpopular″ time, but we need to make efficient use of the space we have.

• Schedule - AVS and TIN lectures on Mondays have a 6-hour long blank space between them. Couldn't this situation be avoided, at least for the next generation?

  See question two above. In general, you can't please everyone.

Sexual harassment

• Could the faculty transparently inform what is being said in the corridors that there has been and perhaps still is harassment of female students at the faculty?

  The wording of this question is surprising. Generally, we cannot be transparent about what is ″talked about in the corridors″. Why? Because we simply cannot know. If you, as an adult citizen, become aware of a potentially criminal act, please report it to the police. Alternatively, you can use one of the contact points at FIT (see the website www.fit.vut.cz/study/social-safety/). As far as the ″safe environment″ is concerned, we conduct staff training and will conduct additional training for contact persons and offer training to students as well. Regarding possible sexual harassment, investigations are currently underway at the PCR regarding two FIT staff members with no conclusion yet. One started with a series of anonymous letters, the other with a submission by a specific person. We will not disclose the names (for obvious reasons) but will try to avoid direct contact as a precaution. The faculty treats officially reported incidents with complete seriousness.

State final examinations

• Given the overall (un)success rate on State Final Examinations, wouldn't it be advisable to reduce the number of thematic areas? Or at least specify precise questions for each area?

  No. The aim of education is for students to know the content of courses and to be able to demonstrate this in the SZZ. The best way to eliminate failure in the SFE is for you, the students, to learn.