What is S3P and what is it used for?
From your initial registration, paying your fees, recording notified absences, up to the annual renewal of your registration, you’ll have to make sure all of this gets recorded via S3P. More information on how to use it, can be found here.
When you go to the login page, you will be asked for a user name. This is your login to University systems – generally a letter and then your student number. If you are a new student this will be sent to you with your password.
You will need to enter a password. This will have been sent to you by e-mail. You can use the online option to reset your password. If you have not been sent a password by e-mail there may be a problem with your record, so contact us or the graduate school as soon as possible.
What is ePortfolio?
ePortfolio is the online system to manage students’ progression through their postgraduate studies. If you have to use ePortfolio you almost certainly know how to log on here using your campus identity and password. There is excellent on-line help, and we won’t be teaching you how to use it. However, we can pass on some of the practicalities and facts of life that will help you to make better use of ePortfolio.
Who uses ePortfolio?
ePortfolio is used by students, their supervisors, the panel members, by us in the ICM postgraduate team, and by the Dean’s team in the graduate school. In order to log in, you must have a Newcastle University campus login; it is not possible to have a presence on ePortfolio without. This is one very practical reason why the named supervisors have to be members of the University.
So can’t I use the paper system, like previous students used to?
No.
What is ePortfolio used for?
Among other things, recording the milestones in a student’s research career:
- approval of project proposal
- monitoring of supervisory meetings
- annual progression reviews
- appointment of examiners
What do I need to know?
ePortfolio is particularly good at record-keeping; it helps to enforce good practice by making sure that things happen, that they happen at the right time and in the correct order. The paper-based system of student progression was very clumsy; it was easy for progression reviews to be missed, paperwork got lost in transit, and some elements of contemporary practice like the monitoring of meetings would have been impossible.
This attention to detail can be a double-edged sword. It is now very unusual for a student to avoid the regular review of their project and progress. However it does rely on everybody playing their part; it is possible for one person to stall the entire process.
What are the problems?
As with any complex computer system, there are problems. In our experience, the meeting and progression records are normally up-to-date, accurate and easily accessible. However a lot of the background information in ePortfolio is drawn down from SAP, the University’s central people management software. The information in SAP is not updated according to the student’s actual circumstances, and can be out of date. For example: it is rarely clear from ePortfolio which academic year a student is in. A ‘year 3’ student is in their 3rd year at the University, but isn’t necessarily in year 3 of their degree programme.