With Student Finance England opening part-time applications today (as distance learning, all OU tuition is classified as part-time), I’ve completed enrolment and finance applications for next year. Normally, I’ve sailed past enrolment by March. Honestly, I’m impressed that I can fix myself a sandwich most days in lock down. This is positively high-functioning for me this year.

Next year will be the opposite of last year’s slog. It’s practically a cake walk. Except no cake at the end. Alright, I’ll probably have cake. And definitely rum. Anyway, I’m giving myself the easiest start to stage 3 study that I could. I’ll certainly be regretting that I said this by next February or March, but it might be the most relaxing year I’ve had since the lazy days of TU100.

Instead of the three module crush of last year, I’m back down to just two this year. And I’m only carrying on two of last year’s modules. I’m following up TT284 Web Technologies with MT352 Web, Mobile, and Cloud Technologies. I’m not great with web development, but I’m not awful. I imagine the mobile stuff will mostly involve converting web applications to mobile apps, with accessing phone I/O and environmental considerations thrown in. But it’s just a guess and I could be in for a rude awakening. As for cloud technologies, I used to build and deploy IAAS platforms, so I’m happy to get a more academic view of that. At least I’ll have plenty of practical context for the discussion. Based on some hints dropped in the TT284 materials, I’m also expecting to play a bit with SOAP and REST, and also JSON and more XML. All of which seems interesting, so clearly I’m missing something. (Okay, so it will mostly be report writing again, probably. So I get to whet my procrastination skills.)

I’m going from TM257 Cisco Networking (CCNA) Part 1 to TM357 Cisco Networking (CCNA) Part 2. This is really just the second half to what used to be a single 60 credit module, except the second half has been updated from V6 of the CCNA materials to V7. I’m not going to lie, TM257 was hard work, and there was a lot of it, but it was doable. In fact, the amount of confidence I got was not insignificant. Which has been something of a recurring theme with OU study.

And that’s it. Please don’t shake my obvious self-denial about the workload differential between stages 2 and 3. If I thought for one minute that two stage 3 modules might end up being tougher than three stage 2 modules, well … My lock-down-defeated self just probably couldn’t take it.

Good luck to everyone else gearing up for next year.