From 01.02. to 12.02. we collected your feedback on our work as ÖH Student Union (StV) for Informatik & AI.
76 people participated in our survey, you can find their demographics at the end.
Last year's survey can be found here.
These are the detailed results for each question and what we plan to do as a consequence.
Responses to some questions were moved and handled at a more appropriate position.
Scale questions could be answered using a scale from 1 (strongly disagree) to 7 (strongly agree). The average and median are given to account for outliers.
AVG: 5.4, MED: 6
Agreement with this statement has dropped slightly compared to last year (0.4 pts). Overall, we are still very happy with this result.
The student union offers a bunch of services: They should help you in your studies, improve your study life in general, or should make the rest of our work more transparent. Listed are just some of the services we offered last year.
These questions could be answered for all listed services by selecting one of the following responses:
Service | (1) | (2) | (3) | (4) |
---|---|---|---|---|
Discord-Server | 64 | 7 | 1 | 2 |
Study Guides ("Leitfaden") | 37 | 5 | 11 | 16 |
Study Cafés ("Sprechstunden-Cafés") | 17 | 4 | 41 | 8 |
Informatik-Mentoring* | 18 | 4 | 12 | 3 |
AI-Mentoring* | 8 | 4 | 8 | 8 |
StV-Dashboard | 11 | 3 | 23 | 33 |
Bachelor Information Event Inf* | 15 | 3 | 14 | 4 |
Bachelor Information Event AI* | 9 | 5 | 10 | 3 |
Master Information Event | 9 | 5 | 40 | 15 |
Confidential Contacts | 4 | 3 | 17 | 43 |
jkuroomsearch.app | 13 | 7 | 15 | 33 |
#job-offers on Discord | 19 | 7 | 33 | 11 |
StV-Event-Calendar | 31 | 6 | 15 | 18 |
*We have split these questions based on answers in the Demographics section.
Unfortunately, only some respondents used the free-text field to explain how services could be improved. In our evaluation, we have therefore also looked into the demographics and will mention results if we think they can explain some of these numbers a bit better.
The StV provides and moderates a Discord server for all of its students to give you a place to talk to each other and ask questions to members of the student union. You can also find exams and memes here.
Other than two students who have only had us for a semester, our Discord seems to be very well known. It is also very well-liked, there were no suggestions for improvement. For all who haven't joined already, you can do so using this link: https://discord.gg/wAek576
Our Study Guides (or "Leitfäden") are information brochures that should help you with your study start and answer your most frequent questions. They are specifically designed for first semester Bachelor students, but we are planning on extending the offer to Master students as well in the future.
Unfortunately, a lot of both AI and CS Bachelor students seem to not know about our guides even though information about them is sent out with every Welcome Mail at the beginning of the semester. If this is the first time you are hearing of it, check out the AI Study Guide (English) and the Informatik-Leitfaden (German) here!
We are considering giving them out during Mentorings (see below) to ensure that more students know about them. Nobody provided suggestions for improving them.
Every week, both AI and CS organize our "Sprechstunden-Cafés" in our lovely office. This is your opportunity to grab a free cup of coffee and some cake and rant about any problems in your study. It is a very valuable way for us as a Student Union to get to know your problems and try to fix them, and it is a really fun place to exchange ideas, get to know people, and receive advice from veterans of your study.
Our Study Cafés are pretty well known and there were no specific change requests. Still, many do not visit them (which is something we have observed as well ever since the Covid years). While a portion of these answers probably also has to do with the distance learning nature of our studies, we are sad to see these dwindling numbers, especially in CS. For the new semester, we have again tried to choose time slots that work well with most curricula and we hope to see you in your breaks!
You can always find the current dates on our website.
For all first-year students, we offer Mentorings in the winter semester to provide support for your study start. They are a mandatory part of the Informatik curriculum ("Propädeutikum") and have recently become mandatory for AI as well ("Lecture Series AI"). You can find more information about the Informatik-Mentoring here and about the AI-Mentoring here.
As you can tell by the way it is ingrained in your curriculum, this service is also something the study coordinators and the university are supporting a lot and which we have had a lot of success with in the past. You might have already read in an update post on Discord, that because the AI Mentoring is still very new, we are currently reworking parts of it. We are for example trying to move it to an own LVA in the AI curriculum and are reconsidering parts of the format. Since more and more AI students are joining the StV as the study matures, we are also able to offer better-trained tutors in the next winter semester to provide you with a better experience.
The Informatik-Mentoring is also getting an overhaul: We want to stretch out the meetings a bit to provide more support throughout the year and less information overload at the beginning. As with all things organized with the university, changes take a while to go into effect so please be patient. We will discuss adding these changes to AI as well.
We have received the suggestion to ask our mentors to take their students to some of our events, which is a great idea. Many tutors (being members of the StV) do that already, but we will include it in our guidelines going forward.
We were also asked to make the Mentorings optional: While we understand the request, the study commission has noticed a significant improvement in reducing drop-out rates etc., from it: Not only does it help form study groups more quickly, it also makes students a lot more likely to contact Profs or the ÖH if something is wrong. While the format might therefore change in the future, the requirement to attend is here to stay (also, it's usually two mandatory ~2h meetings, that should be manageable).
We are very puzzled about the last two columns for this question - while Master students might never have had the Mentorings, several first-semester students also don't seem to know what we are talking about.
In an effort to make our work more transparent, the StV has created a public project Dashboard last year. You can see all of our project groups there and learn who does what in the student union. We have recently also added a section in which you can learn more about our members. Check the Dashboard out here!
We fully understand that not everybody is interested in what we do - we are still surprised how so many have never heard of this service, given that it is mentioned in all of our work updates and is featured on our website. As you can also see in the Dashboard itself, we are still waiting for the ÖH JKU's IT department to provide us with a domain so we can make it more accessible and use it in print as well.
Finishing your Bachelor's and getting all the formalities of the Thesis project right can be hard. To help you out, we are offering an info event for each study once a year. The "Informatik Bachelor Info-Abend" is offered hybrid in German while the "AI Bachelor Info Event" is done online in English. At the event, institutes also get the opportunity to present some possible Thesis topics you can write with them. You can find the recordings and slides for 2023 here.
An AI student asked us to reduce the time institutes get to present their topics. We understand the issue and have tried to combat it this year by giving a detailed schedule of the event beforehand. This way, you can simply tune in to the parts that interest you personally and skip the rest. Other than that, no recommendations for improvement were made, which is a bit frustrating given that a third of the respondents that visited the event saw room for improvement. We invite you to give us some more ideas directly!
Following last year's feedback form, we are now also offering yearly Master Info events. Contrary to the Bachelor Info Events, they focus more on choosing a Master's and finishing it, not so much on the different institutes. You can watch our first event here.
We did not receive any suggestions for changes - since this is a very new service, we would be happy to get some more feedback directly to fix the issues some apparently had with the way it was conducted last time.
If you want to discuss a more sensible topic privately, or if you encounter problems with a member of the StV, you might not want to contact the whole Student Union. This is why we have introduced Confidential Contacts last year: They will treat your issues in a confidential manner and can then bring them up anonymously with the relevant people, e.g., the head of the StV. We want to make you as comfortable as possible; they won't take any steps without your prior consent.
It is clear that this service is not well known yet. So far, we have mainly advertised the service on Discord (see e.g., the #rules message) and on our Dashboard. We want to increase its visibility, so confidential contacts will now receive a special Discord role that makes them visible on the top of the role list. We will also include their contact details on our website.
Confidential Contacts are only a part of a larger program the Student Union is undertaking to make our events and the StV itself safer, more inclusive and more welcoming: We are also working on Awareness Teams for some of our events, together with the university-wide student union (see for example the JKU Games).
An alumnus of the Student Union has created a service that crawls KUSSS to provide you with a list of unbooked rooms, the Student Union is paying for the domain. While the service is of course not able to know of any external bookings (that are not in the normal KUSSS system), it can still help you to find a free study room more easily. Check it out: jkuroomsearch.app
The service is not well-known yet, we are only advertising it occasionally. We are planning to include it in our Study Guides and on our website to change that.
The Student Union is frequently contacted by companies about open positions. Our team checks the offers for compliance with the minimum salary according to the collective agreement. We then forward them to you by posting them on Discord in the #job-offers channel.
We didn't get any recommendations to change up our current procedure. If you feel like it needs improvements, please let us know.
Our bigger events and deadlines can be found in our Calendar. Add it to your calendars to never miss an event again!
You seem to be fairly happy with how it is administered, we will try to keep it like that.
In last year's survey, we were asked to create an FAQ. Throughout the last year, we have extended on this idea and have actually created several different FAQs for different topics. As is their nature, they are a work in progress and will be extended continuously from now on.
In a truly herculean effort we have finally finished the FAQs (for now): Since most of them weren't out yet when the survey was conducted, we have not yet gotten any feedback on them. Check them out!
We are looking forward to your thoughts!
The student union offers many events throughout the year. The core idea of them is usually to help you connect with friends and get to know other people at the uni and to advertise our services. A lot of the time, events are organized with the student unions of other technical subjects (the "ÖH TNF"). These are just some of the events we did last year:
These questions could be answered for all listed events by selecting one of the following responses:
Events | (1) | (2) | (3) | (4) |
---|---|---|---|---|
Regulars' Table Linz ("Stammtisch") | 17 | 8 | 38 | 6 |
Vienna Events | 2 | 4 | 39 | 24 |
StV-Barbeque | 25 | 6 | 22 | 17 |
Welcome Party ("Einstandsfest") | 30 | 6 | 23 | 9 |
Discord Meme-Awards | 22 | 4 | 31 | 11 |
Eval-Day | 13 | 8 | 37 | 11 |
JKU GAMES | 23 | 2 | 41 | 3 |
ÖH TNF Summer Barbeque | 33 | 4 | 23 | 10 |
ÖH TNF Punschstand | 23 | 6 | 34 | 4 |
ÖH TNF Park Café | 11 | 3 | 35 | 20 |
External Events (advertised on Discord) | 12 | 4 | 43 | 9 |
Every month, we organize a Regulars' Table in a bar at the uni for all CS and AI students. You are invited to come and talk to your colleagues in a chilled atmosphere, we pay for your first drink. Once a semester, your teachers are invited as well.
While we did not receive much direct feedback about the event itself, we are not really happy with it ourselves. The current location in the LUI is pretty loud and chaotic, which makes it very hard to get to know other people. We are talking with some of the surrounding dorm bars in the area to find a calmer location until summer when we can go outside into the LUI Gastgarten again.
We were informed that the event seems very alcohol-centered and isn't welcoming to non-drinkers, which is obviously not the intention: All bars in consideration offer many non-alcoholic drinks as well, and we don't want to pressure anyone into drinking. We will try to change our invitation text to better reflect this.
We were asked to stop pinging @everyone for this event on Discord. We have already given our considerations extensively in last year's feedback and have since further reduced the number of pings you receive. We don't plan to change our notification system further in the near future: It's one Stammtisch ping per month.
Last semester, we tried out offering some events in Vienna for our distance learning students.
Unfortunately, we are still struggling to get the ball rolling because we lack the resources we have at the JKU. One of the most significant issues is the small number of Vienna-based student union members: To help organize the events, our members often need to travel to Vienna, which makes evening events very hard to pull off.
We haven't given up on the idea yet, but we can fully understand that they have not been received too well so far. We'll keep you posted on any developments here - if you happen to live in Vienna and want to help us out, feel free to contact us!
Every summer we organize a massive BBQ for all CS and AI students - and their Profs - at the JKU. All drinks and food are on us!
It is not surprising that most first-semester students don't know our legendary BBQs yet, as they only happen in summer - when correcting for them, the event is similarly well received as the others.
We did receive a lot of valuable feedback at last year's barbeque already and have changed up a few things for the upcoming ones, such as creating different queues for the different food choices etc.
Some of the feedback we received on this survey was surprisingly harsh: While we would like to provide you with more free stuff, there is only so much we can afford with our limited budget.
We also want to stress that contrary to the feedback we received, this event did of course offer vegetarian and vegan food as well (as do all other food events we organize), and we had a variety of non-alcoholic beverages. From registration forms, we know that about a quarter of all our students prefer non-meat options and we aim to accompany that preference - we will try to communicate your food choices even more clearer in our next invitation.
If all this food talk has made you hungry, you can already mark 22.05 - 24.05 in your calendars, this semester's edition will most likely take place on one of these days.
The Einstandsfest is the winter semester equivalent of the StV-Babeque: We offer you free food and drinks, and help you to get to know your colleagues and Profs.
Similarly to the BBQ, a significant portion of our yearly budget is invested in this event: We provide as much as we can afford.
We were told that the location is very noisy, which makes it hard to get to know people. Unfortunately, because the event is set in the winter semester to reach our new students early, we can't move the event outdoors. It's very hard to find a different indoor area in the uni that provides space for more than 500 guests, so we are pretty much stuck with the location. Fortunately, the hall has just been renovated - we hope that this improves the sound situation a bit.
Based on your feedback, we are also considering creating dedicated English-speaking areas or differently colored language-wristbands to facilitate the integration of international students a bit more. Let us know what you think of this idea!
In an effort to promote participation on our Discord, we organized our first Discord Meme-Awards this semester. Users could vote for their favorite memes of the semester, the winner were awarded prestigious prices.
It was a pretty light-hearted event and was quite well received, by the looks of it. You can find the winner announcement video here. If you want to participate next time, join our Discord!
Every semester students have the opportunity to provide feedback about their courses using the JKU's evaluation system on KUSSS. As student union, we depend on this feedback, because it gives us leverage when we want to change things in the study commissions. To promote the evaluation, we organize an Eval Day.
Usually, the ÖH TNF organizes the eval day on its own, rents a room, and provides some snacks/ice cream and drinks. Because the JKU wanted to advertise its new evaluation system, we suggested creating a university-wide event instead. Because of communication issues between the ÖH JKU (the uni-wide representation) and the JKU, the ÖH TNF never really got involved in the planning of the event, other than the initial brainstorming meeting that kicked it off.
We were really unhappy with how this semester's eval day turned out because of that, and it seems like you shared our frustration, considering the feedback we got. Despite the way bigger budget, the atmosphere was not what we usually strive for (there were no snacks, no music, and the setting was very formal). We have already reached an agreement with the responsible office of the JKU that we will be a lot more involved in next semester's event and that the communication is going through us directly. Sorry for that, we hope that didn't stop you from evaluating!
Every semester, the ÖH TNF organizes a massive gaming event for all members of the JKU: Be it board games, PC, VR, or Pen and Paper, we've got you covered. You can find out more at https://games.oeh.jku.at!
Last semester was the first time we tried out a new location to better accommodate for the huge interest in the event - overall, it was very well-liked and we got a lot of positive feedback at the event itself. This questionnaire yielded similar results: Some of the collected feedback about it has been answered on the event website directly.
If you want to join in next time, the next JKU Games are already coming up on 17.03 - 19.03.
More BBQ = More Better. That's why the ÖH TNF organizes a second one after the StV-BBQs. The TNF edition is a lot bigger and open to all, which is why we can't offer our food for free there. It's definitely worth visiting still, however!
Like the StV one, new students have obviously not yet experienced this event. Most of the others seem to have really liked it, however: We were also quite happy with how it turned out and have already started planning the next one (Save the date: 13.06).
Every winter semester, the ÖH TNF offers hot (non)alcoholic Punsch to help you get through the cold weather and the even harsher exams.
We had a lot of visitors, and all of our reservoirs were dried out! According to the feedback, the event was quite a success as well (other than one person who didn't like the Punsch).
Once every semester, the Study Café moves location and is held in the Science Park for all technical students, for a whole day. Get free coffee, tea, cake, cookies, and everything else we can think of, together with some tips and tricks on how to organize your study!
We usually don't advertise this event too much because it is mainly aimed at passers-by whom we don't reach with our normal outreach methods. As such, it was only advertised once via Discord and with some Posters - this is probably why many respondents haven't heard about the event so far. We were quite happy with the turnout, so we will probably keep our advertising strategy like that.
We are frequently contacted by companies and other organizations about advertising their events. If they seem relevant to our students, we will usually post them (un-pinged) on Discord.
By the looks of it, big portions of you don't really attend the events offered. The ones that do seem quite happy with our procedure. Since not much interest exists, we will not extend the offer and will simply keep it like it is right now.
Overall, you seem pretty happy with both our services and events. We already have a bunch of ideas on how to improve the things you are unhappy about.
Two major general requests we got were to make our events more open to international students and to offer more online events. Frustratingly, it's complicated to do both. There are several reasons why we have pivoted away from online events after Lockdown ended: We have noticed that it is just really hard to organize an event where everybody can bring themself in and can have their own side conversations. For a big study like ours, an online meeting really only lends itself to a lecture format with a central speaker, it's very hard to engage bigger crowds otherwise for a long time. Additionally, during Covid, we noticed that language barriers are an even bigger problem online, as a mainly German-speaking crowd is reluctant to switch to English there. With in-person events, different languages are possible simultaneously.
We have done a couple (our info events are usually hybrid, and the Meme-Awards were mostly online as well), but we are struggling to find things that can really achieve our goal of networking in a similar style as the in-person stuff can. Feel free to give us ideas, and we will see if we can accommodate them.
We also got some very specific requests:
Tool | # |
---|---|
Discord | 65 |
42 | |
5 | |
Print (Posters, Flyers, …) | 10 |
Colleagues | 25 |
Calendar | 1 |
Other | 1 |
Multiple Answers could be picked. A free-text option was provided as well ("Other").
All respondents that answered this question can be reached using either Discord or E-Mail (which is not too surprising given that we only sent it out on these two channels), with 31 not being reached via E-Mail and 8 not being reached via Discord.
We will therefore continue our approach of advertising most of our events and services on both, with the minor things only happening over Discord and the really big stuff getting posters and social media coverage as well. We hope that you also keep reminding your colleagues, as word-of-mouth unsurprisingly also seems to be a big factor.
The main reason why we personally prefer Discord is that this is the way we can reach you quickest (and can also immediately respond to feedback). Mass E-Mails we send have to go through the uni-wide ÖH's mail office and can sometimes take a week to go out because we don't have direct access to your contact data. This also means that we cannot unsubscribe you from our mailing list, please contact the ÖH JKU secretary if you don't want to receive our email.
We were also asked to stop sending out announcements in English only. While we generally understand why people prefer bilingual messages, we know from last year's (bilingual) survey that pretty much all of you can understand English without any problems - it is after all a major part of all of our studies. As announced back then, we have decided to therefore only send out matters of high relevance to you and your study in German and English (such as big events and most of our e-mails) and keep the purely informational stuff (such as this survey) in English only.
AVG: 5.72, MED: 6
AVG: 5.63, MED: 6
AVG: 5.64, MED: 6
Even though the average has dropped very slightly compared to last year (5.98, 5.77, 5.86), we are very happy with these results. We have already talked about our initiatives to make the StV a more welcoming place above, and want to invite you once again to bring up any concerns in this regard with our confidential contacts.
Please also tell us if any advice we gave you was wrong or if we missed something - otherwise, we might repeat making the same mistake again.
From your responses, you seem to have been happy with how our questionnaire was structured (and about the fact that we are doing this survey in general). When reading through your responses, we noticed however that we should have included another question in the Demographics section on if you are a distance student, because this would have given us some interesting insights as well.
We were also asked to try and make the Master more suitable for working students, i.e., by having fewer morning courses and clustering courses on certain days (instead of spreading them over the whole week). We will recommend this change in the study commissions, but previous attempts at this have not been very fruitful so we don't have tremendous hope. Unfortunately, the curriculum very clearly states that the study assumes a full-time workload.
All in all, we are happy with the responses we got and we have a lot of new ideas for the next year. Please be patient if some things don't work out or take longer than you hoped for - we are all volunteers trying our best and sometimes other things get in the way.
Thank you for your kind words and all your feedback! We hope we could clear up all your questions, and that we could maybe introduce you to some new services and events. We are planning on polling you again next year.
If there are still things that seem unclear or if you think we missed your answer, feel free to ping us on Discord or send us an email at informatik-ai@oeh.jku.at! If you have further suggestions to resolve some of the issues mentioned, feel free to talk to us in person as well.
We are looking forward to seeing you again next semester!
These were the demographics of our respondents - as you can see, more CS students answered our questionnaire, we generally reached quite a mixed group however.
Study | # |
---|---|
Bachelor Informatik | 31 |
Master Computer Science | 16 |
Bachelor Artificial Intelligence | 19 |
Master Artificial Intelligence | 9 |
Multiple studies could be picked.
In other words, how many semesters have you had us as your StV?
Semester | Amount |
---|---|
1 | 19 |
2-3 | 18 |
4-5 | 14 |
6-7 | 9 |
>7 | 12 |