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The first TMA for TT284 Web Technologies takes the form of a report detailing standards, usability, and accessibility in web pages, with practical elements in HTML and CSS. Or at least that’s the form it took this year.

It’s a difficult one to coordinate time-wise, because you can’t really write it in bits and pieces, then put it all together when you’re ready. You have to mostly wait until you’re ready to write the whole thing and then start. The study planner does nothing to help students crank this out in week six, with six weeks of reading necessary prior to getting underway.

The materials themselves, however, I thought were good preparation for such an assignment, and the assignment itself was good. As boring as listening to podcasts about electing a treasurer for a club you’re not in, it’s exactly the type of document I’ve been called on to produce for work. Not all the things you’ll need to know are in the materials, but they give excellent external resources for independent study. I had to find my own resources for accessibility concerns, however, as neither the OU materials nor the referenced materials were really good enough for anything other than highlighting their importance.

The biggest road block to the TMA was determining how much to do. There was a very broad scope of work, but a very tight word count. The challenge was in forcing yourself to do too little so you’d stay in the word count, but choose the things with the best impact, in terms of demonstrating the learning outcomes of the module. (Always keep learning outcomes in mind when writing assignments! That’s what the assignments are supposed to assess. Except in TM254, where they’re essentially random questions that might not relate to this plane of existence.)

Due to this challenge, I felt the best I could come away with as a marking was 92, and wouldn’t have been shocked to get as low as 80. I was extremely happy to have received the full 100 marks. My tutor gave great, specific feedback about what she liked, so I know what’s working. I also feared I’d get called out for having a page and a half of references for a 2000 word report, but that seemed to be one of my tutor’s favourite parts.

I won’t receive my first TMA back from TM257 or M269 for a while (they’re not due for another two or three weeks, so may hear back by Christmas), but I have more optimism for those than I had for this TMA.

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I can’t believe it’s only been five and a half weeks since my modules started. I feel like I’ve been going flat-out for nearly half a year. I’m caught up through the first 8 weeks of study in all three modules, and have the first TMA submitted for each of them, but that doesn’t tell the whole story.

There’s a bit of a time crunch in TT284 trying to finish up the end of the first block and submit the first TMA at the same time. The module team claim they don’t have recommendations for how long a block section will take to study so that students can better manage their time. If the module materials were printed, it would be easy to know at a glance roughly how long it might take to get through a section. But when it’s just a series of web pages that are of varying lengths, it’s quite a task to estimate the effort. There are also a lot of external reading recommendations that are only partially signalled ahead of time, so you can’t estimate these at all until you come upon them in the primary reading.

Anyway, none of that would have been a problem, but I promised my sons that I would make them Halloween costumes this year. Doing that alongside three modules and a TMA not accounted for in the module planner just about did me in. It wasn’t until Halloween was actually underway and I had one less thing on my plate that I was finally able to relax.

After that TMA was done, though, the two for the other modules tumbled out quickly. I’d done bits and pieces for all three all the way along, but TT284 (Web technologies) was one big essay-style report. You can do all the prep you want for something like that, but eventually you have to sit down and write it, and you basically can’t start any of it until you’re ready to start all of it. While it’s a pain of a TMA, and boring as imaginable, it’s also quite like a piece of work I’d actually be asked to produce for my day job, referencing excepted. So I can’t fault it. It’s a quality assessment. It’s difficult to gauge how well I’ve done on a monolith report. I expect I will have fewer specific examples of one or another classification than the tutor wants, and I only summarised some results rather than documenting them explicitly. I’d say it’s in the 85-92 region. I’d be disappointed but not surprised if I got something in the 80-85 range.

My TMA for M269 (Algorithms and data structures) was obviously a lot more fun, as it involved writing code and solving problems. The first time I wrote it, I gave a page and a half mathematical proof for a question worth just 3 marks. After all, it said, “Explain your answer.” In the end I just showed practical steps rather than the maths that would make it applicable to any problem. Anyway, if I’ve missed something on that TMA, it will be because I misread something, not because I understood it wrong or explained it poorly. I’m almost certainly above 90 marks on that one.

The TM257 (Cisco networking) assignment was great. A full 70% of the marks comes from stuff you do studying on the module anyway, and there’s very little room for the tutor to change the marks there. I’m confident I have the full 70 marks. For the other 30, I’ve done a great job with a 20 mark question, and expect full marks for that one, too. For the last 10 marks, I’m really not sure. It’s a diagram. But it’s a diagram with … Well, a lot of information on it. I emailed my tutor to explain my approach to the diagram, and that 10 marks didn’t seem like nearly enough for the question. He said that my approach was fine, but that 10 marks was possibly overly generous. So we’re clearly speaking two different languages. There’s scope to wipe out about 25 marks from mis-annotation on my diagram, so it’s difficult to believe it could be worth less than 10. So that one should come out above 90 marks as well, but I don’t know by how much.

Anyway, I’m caught up with TMAs until basically the end of January, so I’m going to crack on with my heavier-than-normal courseload. School Christmas fairs might do me in, though.