In June we announced the acquisition of the Sir James Matthews building in Guildhall Square, which we can now confirm will be open for teaching from the start of this academic year.
The Sir James Matthews (SJM) building enables us to extend our education into the heart of Southampton, offering students a vibrant city centre experience and strengthening our ties to the local community. It also allows us to accommodate our planned expansion of student numbers in good quality teaching and learning space.
Those colleagues that will have their programmes timetabled for teaching in the SJM building in Semester 1 will be informed this week ahead of the publication of draft timetables, when we will share more detailed information.
The process of identifying the educational activities that are best suited for timetabling in this new space has been based on a series of sound pedagogical principles. These include:
- Ensuring that cohort size is well matched to the spaces available
- Ensuring the teaching approach used by colleagues timetabled there is well served by the space configurations available that particularly supports a plenary followed by breakout work approach
- Minimising staff and student travel between campuses
- Effective scheduling that ensures travel time is accounted for, and that activities timetabled at SJM run for a minimum of two hours
- Meeting additional teaching requirements such as accessibility
- Ensuring a range of disciplines and students are represented, to create a dynamic campus atmosphere
A SharePoint site will be made available next week, and will include FAQs as well as other useful information which will be regularly updated.
