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This is going up at least a month later than I wanted it to. But I’m just having difficulty figuring out what to say about TT284. That’s because there’s precious little to review.

I just didn’t feel like there was enough in this module to be considered a Stage 2 module. I don’t know if it’s because I already know and use a lot of the technologies the module references. Maybe it’s because I have my own practices for the planning and specification phases. Or it could be that it’s just light on content.

The module materials encourage students to interact by visiting the forums and writing about specified topics. This doesn’t actually garner any (well … much) diaglogue. It’s mostly just a graveyard for scraps of students’ notes. The best way I found to use this was to look for alternate viewpoints to my own, but spending my precious study time combing through poorly formed and poorly informed thoughts had a low return on investment.

What really did work for me was the assessment for the module. Assessments were split down the middle with practical activities and academic (or, rather, academic-dressed-up-as-vocational) reports. I really felt like it did a good job of allowing students show that they could both perform and understand the details from the module’s learning objectives. The feedback from my particular tutor was insightful and constructive.

The module doesn’t teach much, though. It exposes. It gives a whirlwind tour of web-building technologies, and approaches to designing web applications. There’s a whole lot of copy-and-pasting intended. You’d come out of this module knowing what you don’t know, which is a good starting point, but that feels more like a first stage module to me. In fact, that sort of seems like the intention of the web design portions of Harvard’s CS50, but you definitely learn more on that module. And that’s just a very small section of a free-to-all introductory course.

Of course, CS50 only teaches the practical, technical side of web design, and none of the design, specification, or non-technical details. It doesn’t cover wire frames, specification gathering, accessibility considerations. It only briefly considers architectures. But it’s also only a few weeks long.

I guess my bottom line for TT284 is that it’s just not advanced enough for Stage 2. It would be an ideal module in place of TM129 … Or maybe even just one of its three blocks.

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Since TM257 is kind of a non-module, a non-review seems appropriate. And the great thing for me is that a non-review seems like it should be rather quick to not write.

As stated many places, the content for TM257 comes from Cisco’s NetAcad course environment. It comprises NetAcad courses for CCNA R&S: Introduction to Networks and CCNA R&S: Routing and Switching Essentials. You read very, very dry web pages that are like a Flash website-book, check understanding through a variety of drag-and-drop exercises, a very poor syntax checker, and a very awesome virtual network lab called Packet Tracer. (Okay, so the UI for Packet Tracer needs some remedial attention, but its functionality is excellent.) There are glossary flash cards, quizzes, and chapter exams after each portion, and a “final” exam for each of the two constituent courses; one is taken at home, and one is taken at the day school when there isn’t a global pandemic.

NetAcad has all this as a lovely pre-packaged unit, and though dry, it’s very good. The pacing, the knowledge, the checking, the repeating, the practising … It’s a great package. But for it to be an Open University module, it needs more.

It needs learning outcomes. It needs summative assessment. It needs TMAs. And frankly, I’m not very keen on TM257 in this department. The learning outcomes aren’t what NetAcad designed their module to provide, but rather a combination of what it’s observed to provide, and to a degree what it’s hoped to provide. The module team has made it very difficult to compare notes, but it seems that the evaluation fit so poorly this year that possibly nobody scored a distinction-level percentage on one of the EMA questions, and possibly only a couple of people even scored above 70% on it. Which is more or less fine, but it’s less fine when the items being evaluated must have been informed by what was taught by someone else. Either the learning outcome doesn’t match the materials, or the evaluation doesn’t match the learning outcomes. Because it seems a fair stretch to think that the materials did teach what was in the learning outcomes, the learning outcomes were appropriately evaluated, and nobody lucked into a distinction-level answer. Especially when you consider how many certified industry practitioners were on the module.

I mean, I’m not a conspiracy theorist, but I’m beginning to guess why it might be that we can’t get straight answers about how people did on that question.

Anyway, that aside, I suspect we’ll see similar numbers of people with distinctions this year as we did last year, and that seems to fit more or less with other Stage 2 modules. So, over all, in the broad view, it feels like the evaluation is in the right ball park.

So that’s kind of my evaluation of the module, too. It’s got dry materials, great information, and evaluation that’s more or less fine.