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Thanks to the quick pace of studying matrices, MST124’s TMA03 was handed in early, putting me a month ahead of schedule in both modules.  I’ve decided to concentrate on just maths revision for the last few months of the academic year, so switched back to TM129 to complete the last block, Linux.

The first few weeks have many inconsistencies, typos, and factual errors, but then the block improves.  Actually, despite working professionally with Linux, I came to enjoy the block.  The materials weren’t personally challenging, but the ePortfolio again provided fun avenues for self-directed learning.  (Bonus: I picked up many tips.)

A minor issue was the ePortfolio back loading.  The ePortfolio works best if you work on it as you go.  This both checks current understanding, and distributes the workload.  The Linux block has small, mundane activities at the beginning, and several large, interesting ones after completing the final week of study.  This results in students crushed with many longer ePortfolio activities, then the final TMA, then the EMA, in consecutive batterings.  I feel the module team may have missed this perspective.

The TMA is also a bit questionable.  Several marks aren’t covered at all in the materials … which isn’t necessarily bad.  Independent research is clearly indicated, but methods of evaluation weren’t discussed, so it’s testing students’ innate ability rather than understanding of the learning objectives.  Some marks probably test checking Linux man pages … an answer does appear in a man page, but not the related page, giving me ambiguous feelings.  One question involves Intellectual Property law, entirely absent from module materials (and learning objectives), which I feel entirely inappropriate given the complexity of IP law.  Difficulty linking assessment questions to learning objectives has been a consistent issue with this presentation of TM129.  (Another question confuses “Linux” with “Ubuntu” …)

I’m already working on the EMA’s notes.  I doubt I’ll complete it this week as hoped, though.  TM129 TMA02 still isn’t back, but I’m hoping for that this week, too.  I hope to switch back to maths while I’m still ahead there.

2018/05/17 Edit: TMA03 for TM129 back: 96%.  As that’s the lowest mark of all TMAs across my modules this year, I’m pretty happy with my effort level.  All four marks came for the same point: My testing strategy for an impossibly complex task with only 400 words wasn’t robust enough.  I feel that this one failure couldn’t possibly have been worth 1/3 of the points of a section that had four subsections, particularly when some parts of my testing were quite good considering the ridiculous word count.  So in this instance, I respectfully disagree with my tutor’s assessment.  There were only 3 marks reasonably at stake for the testing section, and I definitely secured at least one, so my score should have been a 98.  But what’s two marks, especially when it’s the first and only time I’ve had a strong disagreement with a marking?  (As I’ve had initial disagreements with other markings, but come to see them from my tutor’s perspective over time, there’s a very real chance the same will occur with this.)  On the other hand, his feedback was insightful and useful!  And who could ask for more than that from a tutor?

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Just as I was starting to despair ever seeing TMA02 again, it popped up in my inbox in the middle of the night, about a week late.  I had a stern talk with it, let it know how nervous I get when it stays out till all hours.  I’d like to say that it wouldn’t happen again, but I think we all know that it will.

The results were again too good.  I didn’t get full marks, as I had half a mark deducted for an amazingly obtuse error on my part, but it rounded back up to full marks for the result.  I don’t think later stages will be so forgiving.  It was, of course, on the one part of the TMA that I couldn’t bring myself to proof read, because it was ages since I’d done it, and barely remembered how.  (The exam’s going to be a real treat at this rate.)  Still, aside from that one mistake, I’m very pleased with how well I’ve been doing.  I’m understanding much more than I thought I would, but that’s often due to seeking resources external to the OU for assistance.

After the slog that was differentiation and integration, studying matrices as an absolute sleepwalk.  They weren’t immediately obvious, but I didn’t have to practise too much before they were second nature.  In fact, I found them downright logical and useful.  The mathematics for linking input and output networks have never been that difficult, but they’re messy, and matrices tidy them up nicely.  I tore through the whole unit in two days, and got to work finishing up TMA03.

I submitted my first draft at about 2:30 AM this morning – just half an hour after I got TMA02 back!  I submitted my second draft at about 10:30 AM.  I’ve given it a decent read through, and it’s probably the best I can do for this round, but again I think I’ll do well with it.  As difficult as calculus is, I feel I’ve done a good job grounding myself with it.  And to do it more than a month ahead of the due date is an unexpected relief.  I thought I’d be struggling for time after the way calculus started off.

Part of TMA03 is a practice section for an exam.  It’s only three questions long, and it took me half an hour to get through it.  (The last question was of a form I’d only practised twice before, so it took me nearly all of the half hour to complete.)  At that rate, come exam time I’ll need a little more than four hours to complete the exam, and they only give us three.  I foresee a lot of practice in my future.

2018/03/29 Edit: MST124’s TMA03 back: Full marks again, no comments from the tutor again.  This one was returned only 20 minutes overdue.  I was really pleased with my effort this time, though, and feel for once that the high marks were deserved.

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Last year I was in the States for Christmas, and I had run out of things I could study, anyhow.  (I needed to study an online-only section of the module, and it hadn’t yet been opened.)  By the time January rolled around and the new material was available, I had all the enthusiasm of a slug eyeing up a saltine.  Motivation was … well, it just wasn’t.

This year, on the other hand, was great for study!  As MST124 had hinted that it might be more difficult than anticipated (it may not be, it appears to have been one poorly written unit), I had been putting off the networking block in TM129 until a couple of days before the Christmas break.  I was able to catch up during those few days, and then I remembered how difficult it was to start studying again after a break last year, so I carried on with TM129 over Christmas, particularly the week after.

I wrapped things up on New Year’s day, and cut through all but one question on the TMA yesterday.  So that’s the networking block done, and I’m free to wrestle with maths until just about March.  This should see me through the calculus stuff, so I’m pretty happy about the convergence of events.  I feel there should have been a prophecy to give me a heads up.

So, to the rundown of TM129’s networking block!

The OU didn’t really prepare any of the material for this.  There was an outdated textbook from Microsoft with OU commentary on the chapters, and activities that were also mostly taken from the textbook.  I’m of two minds about the activities.  They were exceedingly simple tasks, that took the form of, “Type this line exactly, and copy down the response you see,” and there wasn’t any thinking involved, even for students who had never run the utilities before.  On the other hand, these are tasks that I perform day-in, day-out for my job, and it’s pretty essential that someone saying they’ve studied networking has had some hands-on experience with it.  I just think that, given the unbridled simplicity, there should have been some beefier assignments on the side.  (Trying to write my ePortfolio’s section reflecting on skills demonstrated, when all I was asked to do was type an exact command and copy-paste the results, was the biggest challenge I faced.)

Significant portions of book discussed dial-up networking.  You’d have to try really hard to still find a dial-up ISP, so while it may help someone pass a certification exam, it’s not going to help anybody do anything useful going forward.  (My condolences to anybody disagreeing, you’re obviously still dealing with dial-up and deserve my pity.)

A section on subnetting had the subnetting wrong in an example.  I was working from an updated release of the book where the mistake had been identified and fixed, except it was still wrong after being fixed.  (The OU staff have found the problems and fixed it properly in the module’s errata section.)

Other than that, the textbook was decently fit for purpose, though it could use some updating about speeds, technologies that are available and prevalent, there could be a lot more time spent on VLSM (variable length subnet masking, which is how subnetting typically exists in the wild, though may not be considered a best practice as not all routing protocols support it), and of course Windows Server 2008 hit End of Life status three years ago this month.  Students were mainly asked to ignore the Windows Server bits, though, so that’s not really an issue.  It’s a decent, if slightly outdated, grounding in networking.

I’m a little concerned about the TMA, though.  In the first section, the number of points allocated appear to disagree with the number of statements I need to correct, so I may need to take a closer look at either the assumption I’ve made about the statements, or the assumption I’ve made about the scoring.

Another problem is that the author of the last question seems to misunderstand the word “scalability”.  The author seems to think that it means the ability to cope with a very large scale.  It means, however, the ability to change the scale with which it can cope, typically from very small to very large.  Crucially, it deals with change, or the ability to be upgraded to handle more capacity with increasing demand without a total redesign.  So I’m going to have to spend some of my very precious 200 word count defending both a system’s ability to handle a large scale, as well as its ability to increase capacity based on increased demand, which I’m pretty sure was not the author’s intent when the word count was set.  So I’ll have to leave out some other parts and will lose points here, as well.

Still, I’d be very surprised if my TMA came in lower than 90%-95%, so I’ll just keep my mouth shut and soldier on.

So that’s a very long winded post for today, but it does represent eight or nine weeks of study compressed into two.  Also, Storm Eleanor is blowing buildings around here, right now, so long-winded seems appropriate.

2018/3/9 Edit: TM129 TMA02 finally came back.  It received a 97.  Missing marks were because the tutor felt I was being redundant at an aspect I felt I was being thorough in (fair enough), and two marks off because I didn’t discuss the history of a technology, which wasn’t expressly asked for.  This is not a bad thing.  It looks at first blush like saying, “You didn’t guess the colour I was thinking of,” but realistically, that’s part of the job.  We’re not given full context in our questions.  It’s up to us to discover or create context, or (failing that) to give a complete answer despite not having full context.  It’s a skill I’m normally good with, and I fell short this time.

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I had temporarily halted all work on TM129 so that I could get back out ahead with MST124.  That’s because after the disaster that was Unit 3 (functions, which should be much easier than MST124 made it), I thought I’d have to work through the Christmas break just to keep my head above water.  As I just finished Unit 6 (differentiation, which was mindbogglingly easy) and TMA02, I have a few days to head back to TM129 and pick up a bit of what I’ve stepped away from.

For MST124, it’s definitely easiest to work on the TMA after each unit to finish up the questions for that unit before carrying onto the next.  I ended up putting a whole tonne of unnecessary graphs in, particularly for vectors.  I thought of vectors as Applied Trigonometry, and thoroughly enjoyed them.  The whole thing came out at 3400 words and 27 pages.  My EMA for TU100 was 3500 words and 16 pages.  Who knew there was so much writing in a maths module?

TM129 is being picked up at the networking block, which is a large portion of my job.  It’s basically asking us to read portions of the Microsoft Windows Networking Essentials book, and then do OU activities around it.  I imagine this to be very, very similar to T216.

I mentioned on a tutorial last week that I’d done a MS computer-based training module for networking essentials about twenty years ago, and I swear there are entire paragraphs in this book which haven’t changed from that CBT in all that time.  I’m really not a fan of MS training.

The tutorial was a fun one.  Over the last two or three weeks, I’ve spoken on the mic extensively in four tutorials (two each from TM129 and MST124), and I’m getting a lot more out of them.  It’s even worth looking a bit stupid in the ones that get recorded.  It often feels as though the tutors come wanting a lot of interaction, but end up reading a slide show because it’s difficult to get much give and take.  It’s much easier with voice chatting than typing messages.

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I mentioned last year that trigonometry had been my mathematical Achilles heel until I finally got it smoothed out by Khan Academy in preparation for MST-124.  It wasn’t that I couldn’t do it, it was that I’d have to re-invent it every time I saw a triangle.  And it turns out there are a lot of triangles.

I’m now officially on the far side of Unit 4, which is trigonometry.  By the time I opened up TMA02 and saw the trigonometry stuff, I caught myself saying, “Well this is easy!”  And I wasn’t even punished by the maths gods for my hubris!  It felt really great to be so at ease with the concepts in it.  I can no longer blame not properly learning trig for my failures, and will have to admit to not being that bright, instead.

I also finished the iCMA42 for MST-124 (which covers units 2 through 4) with full marks.  I managed to avoid making the silly, silly mistake I did on the last one, by forcing myself to triple check my answers with a calculator if I got confused by anything.  On the other hand, it took me 9 days and 10 hours to complete, so I can’t necessarily use the same techniques when it comes time for the exam.  A two-week exam would be just about right, though.

Even though I’ve put TM129 away for the time being, I had a chance to attend a last-minute online tutorial with my tutor last week.  He’d had a face-to-face scheduled about forty miles away (and about sixty miles from where he lives), and literally nobody signed up for it, so he sent out an email and did it online.

In the end, there were only three of us on it, but it was just him and me chatting by voice for the first fifteen minutes or so.  Obviously, we didn’t cover much of the actual module material, but we talked a lot about TMA strategies and general study skills.  It was good motivation, as well.  I haven’t yet attended any face-to-face tutorials, but am starting to think it could be quite advantageous.  It’d mean an entire evening away from my children, though, and that’s something I want to avoid after my father’s part-time associate degree left us practically feral for four years.

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After catching up a bit in TM129 the other week, I figured I was done with everything in the Robotics block except for TMA01, so I might as well get that out of the way.  As it’s due in mid-December, and it’s such a fast module to study, I figured that if I got the TMA out of the way, I could put TM129 on the back burner until January and just concentrate on MST124’s maths.

TM129’s TMA01 is quite uneven.  Question 1 mostly tests if you were paying attention during the block, and could mostly be answered using the search function from the module planner.  It also asks for opinions, but it’d be difficult to get your own opinion wrong, so …

Question 2 is weird.  Parts A and C check your understanding of concepts.  Part B tests maths skills.  And maths skills are not a part of the Learning Objectives for TM129.  Yet part B still took two full pages to answer.

Question 3 is just programming the virtual robot.  It’s completely harmless, but fun.  I stretched my wings a bit and included abstraction techniques, self-commenting code methods, and so forth, none of which is part of the module.  If there’s a possibility of getting points docked for talking too much, I’ll be guilty here, but there are no word count limits for any section but question 4.

Speaking of question 4, it’s a report.  They ask for a lot of things, starting with research, and want you to fit it all into 400 words.  The word limit is a bit of a tall order, but it sets the expectations for scope.  One problem is that the specification asks for something contrary to the supplied context of the question.  I included it, but didn’t state that it was in reference to the specification request, so I may lose one or two points here.  (I think my tutor’s pretty good, though, so I don’t really think I will.)

Question 5 is just attaching the ePortfolio for the robotics block.  Which was awesome and fun to do.  I never imagined I’d love the ePortfolio, but I totally do.  Just do it as it comes, and not when the TMA is due, though.  Some students are already starting to struggle back-filling ePortfolio activities.

My MST124 TMA01 came back today, literally the last day it could.  I feel bad for my tutor, as she’s obviously extremely busy.  There were no comments on any of my work at all, and even though I had made (quite a few) errors on the TMA (though all the answers were correct), I was still given the full 100 marks.  I think it may have been a bit of a last minute rush job, and I’ll probably get that with each of the TMAs in this module.

I suppose that means my style is okay.  I’m just under halfway through TMA02, so it’s nice that I won’t have to retype everything in a different style.

I’ve moved on from Unit 3 (Functions and Logarithms) to Unit 4 (Trigonometry), and it’s a breath of fresh air.  I love functions and logarithms, and think they’re the coolest parts I’ve encountered in maths.  But the MST124 materials for Unit 3 were abysmal.  Nearly every student who didn’t already understand the subject matter abandoned the materials for Khan Academy or any other internet site.

Anyway, I’ve got quite a few weeks just to concentrate on maths, so I’m hoping to make quite a bit of headway getting to the calculus stuff.  Which is what we’re all dreading.

2018/3/9 Edit: I just realised I never posted my results for TM129 TMA01.  I received a 98 on it.  The missing points were for disagreeing with a point on the exclusivity of statistical and symbolic data, and a misunderstanding on which parts of my explanation I agreed and disagreed with.  The comments were very helpful in identifying avenues for deeper learning, but didn’t provide much insight to what is being looked for in assignments.  So it’s a mixed bag.

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I submitted my TMA01 quite early for MST124.  I’m really fond of my chances with it.  I’ve gone over it a few times and have a few questions about presentation, but over-all, it’s good.  That’s the advantage to TMAs on a maths module: There’s usually only one answer.  You can be certain of at least getting that part right, and worry about presentation separately.

As stated earlier, I’m using the Microsoft Word Equation Editor to present my maths work.  This makes it easier to do the non-maths portions of the TMAs, and will make it easier for me to include maths in TMAs in non-maths modules.  The only thing I don’t like so far is that fractional indices are presented vertically instead of horizontally, so I have to manually change those before submitting the TMA.

MST124 TMA01 has a portion about simplifying and rearranging algebraic functions, a portion about how to present work (it seems geared to responses to “story problems”, mostly), a section about solving and graphing linear equations, a section about solving and graphing quadratics, and finally a token portion showing that you can use Maxima.  I’m satisfied with the work shown on all sections, and with the answers.  I’m potentially nervous about the level of detail used in the portion about presenting work, but I’ve done about as well as I can without knowing exactly what they’re looking for.

The only thing that really bugs me about the TMA is that it’s a requirement to hand-draw the graphs.  I’m okay doing it, and I know why it’s necessary.  But I’m a perfectionist, and I had to draw those graphs about fifty times each.  I avoided graphing paper as I’d been warned about scanning it in for TMAs, but next TMA I think I’m going to ignore that advice and just submit it on graphing paper anyway.  I can’t imagine an actual deduction so long as I make it all clear.

Anyway, I normally strongly hedge my expectations for TMAs, but I’m hoping for at least a 95 on this one.

I’ve also done my first iCMA (iCMA41) for MST124.  It covered just algebra and quadratics, and didn’t take too long.  I missed a question because when I was double-checking a surd I’d simplified, I second-guessed my answer.  Still, I think it’ll land me with a 90, and it’s only worth 2% of my OCAS anyway.  And let’s face it, that’s probably the highest iCMA I’ll do.

TM129 has been a major shock for me: The shock is how much I’m enjoying it.  Most of all … I love the ePortfolio!  I was dreading it, but it’s fantastic.  It’s basically carte blanche to show how much I learned, or how deeply I understand something.  They only require a few minutes each, but I’ve been spending up to a couple of hours on them, because they’re just that fun.  They’re like mini-TMA questions, and when it comes down to it, I think I enjoy doing TMAs.

I’m keeping the ePortfolio write-ups as brief as I can, but I jam a lot of information to a few short paragraphs.  On one, I researched articles on the OU Library for a well-rounded answer, rather than the guess the activity asked for.  On another, I resolved the robotics problem put to me, and then resolved all possible similar problems, by altering just a single line of code.  It’s really empowering to stretch your wings and see just how much you can actually accomplish when the parameters aren’t so narrow.

I’m about halfway through TMA01 for TM129, which makes sense as I’m also about halfway through the first block.  As I’m learning the most on the ePortfolio activities, that’s where I’m spending the majority of my time.  I’m starting to get into some psychology in the module that I haven’t been exposed to in MOOCs that I’ve done, so it’s nice to be exploring new areas.

Overall, I’m very happy with both modules.  I’m about to get into some more difficult areas in MST124, and that’s knocking my motivation back a bit, so I’ll have to put some ePortfolio activities to the side until after I can struggle through that.

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My TM129 materials finally showed up yesterday.  I’ve already described the box contents, there was nothing unexpected.  I’ve had fun re-reading I, Robot though.

TM129 has one TMA for each of its three blocks, but they won’t be visible to read until closer to their due dates.  (My experience on TU100 tells me that it’s possible the module team isn’t done writing them, yet.)  I gave TMA00 a glance, expecting it be along the lines of write something about why you’re taking the class, and make sure you know how to zip and upload.

On the one hand, I was right: Those things are part of TMA00.  But the second half of it wants us to explore the ePortfolio.

TM129’s ePortfolio is nominally a record of your learning on the module: Activities that are somewhat more involved than practice exercises, and somewhat less involved than TMA questions.  After completing them, you’re asked to discuss the activity, particularly focusing on what skills it demonstrates and what avenues of study it opens up.  The pitch is that you could even show it to prospective employers to show them how much you’ve learned! (Pro tip: Never, ever show the ePortfolio to a prospective employer.  Or anyone.  Ever.)

In reality, the ePortfolio appears to be a tool meant to tie your study to your learning objectives.  And that’s cool!  Because it tells you how to get top grades on your TMAs, EMA, and the module.  The better you can sign-post how your answers match the learning objectives, the better you’re going to do.  In fact, the ePortfolio extra guidance essentially spells out how you can get top marks on your ePortfolio entries and therefore your TMAs.  (It also makes it very, very clear that if you want to half-arse it and just paste a screen shot and a three-line summary, you’re still going to pass TM129.  Welcome to university!)

So how does this fit into TMA00?  You’re asked to make an ePortfolio entry.  Not a fake one, and not a TMA00 specific one.  You’re supposed to read through the ePortfolio and choose any one activity to give a go.  I’d like to shake the hand of the genius who dreamed that up.  It’s a brilliant way to engage the students in A) familiarising themselves with the types of activities contained therein, B) the relative effort levels required, and C) give some thought as to what will be required to complete them.  If they’d asked students to do those things, about a quarter would probably actually spend any thought on it.

I chose an activity from the networking block (of course) and it was something I’d done a million times before: Diagramming my home network.  The trouble with this (and I suspect most things in the networking block … and the Linux block … and possibly the robotics block …) is that if I’ve done those things a million times, how am I going to learn anything, and how am I going to tie not learning anything to my learning objectives?  (Without lying, I mean.  I could take the coward’s way out, but there’s no challenge in that.)

I’m keen to see how my tutor responds to my solution.  To paraphrase Kirk, I changed the conditions of the TMA.  I set myself a challenge that yielded the same result as the proferred activity, but did it in a different way than directed.  (I also did it the way that I was directed, just to cover all the bases.)  I then tied the learning outcomes to the self-created task, and wrote about that, instead.  I highly suspect this will work, but I’ll let you know.

(To be clear, though, students are told to discuss the skills and knowledge displayed by the activity, not to discuss what was learned.)

Anyway, it’s not the only TMA work I’ve done this week.  I’ve also done half of MST124’s TMA01.  I’ve decided to use Word for my TMAs, since that’s likely the only place I’ll need to use written maths skills in the future.  I’ve finished Unit 1, and will complete the rest of the TMA after the module starts and I get through Unit 2.

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Despite what I said in my last post about how difficult LaTeX was to learn compared to how much use I’d probably get out of it … Well, I’d already invested the time in learning it, so why not give it a proper go?

I decided to make a proper template based off the ideas in MST125 Unit 2 (which is available for OU students to view, but they must be logged in).  For any experts out there who are bothered by the methods used, please keep in mind that this was literally my first day with LaTeX.  It gets the job done, and looks pretty … well, prettier.  Some features of the template:

  • Put your name, personal identifier, and TMA number in once, and the title section and footer on every page is updated from it
  • Typing \section{} will not just give the new section, but type Question # for you, with # being the next section number
  • Subquestions are likewise auto-incremented on every \item
  • The text font is a Helvetica sans-serif clone, but the maths font is still serif, making it easier to read

Obviously some parts will need to be cut and pasted, or otherwise modified to your needs.  The actual template I’m using, for instance, is slightly different in that it has a multi-line header instead of a footer, and it’s greyed out rather than having a delineation to match my Word template from last year. (Well, it was.  I’m starting to like this template more.)

Anyway, here’s the template I’m using for MST124.  I’m not taking MST125, so I don’t know whether or not this is part of a TMA question in and of itself.  If it is (or, frankly, even if it isn’t), please keep OU academic integrity practices in mind.

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{amsmath}
\usepackage{amssymb}
\usepackage{enumitem}
\usepackage{fancyhdr}

\def\myname{Your Name} % change this
\def\identifier{F0000000} % change this to your OU personal identifier
\def\tmanumber{TMA 00} % change this to appropriate TMA number or TMA title
\def\presentation{MST124-17J} % change to module presentation or TMA subtitle

\pagestyle{fancy}
\rhead{}
\lfoot{\myname}
\cfoot{Page \thepage}
\rfoot{\identifier}
\renewcommand{\headrulewidth}{0pt}
\renewcommand{\footrulewidth}{1pt}

\author{\myname, \identifier}
\date{} % remove this line to have date printed on title section
\title{\tmanumber\\\bigskip\normalfont\large{\presentation}}

\parindent 0pt % remove for paragraph indent
\parskip 4pt % also remove this for paragraph indent

\usepackage{titlesec}
\titleformat{\section}{\normalfont\Large\bfseries}{Question \thesection}{0em}{ }

\usepackage{nimbussans}
\renewcommand*\familydefault{\sfdefault} % remove for serif font

\begin{document}
  \maketitle
  \thispagestyle{fancy}
  \section{} % writes Question and incremental number
  \begin{enumerate}[label=(\alph*)] % auto-formats item decoration
   \item First subquestion.
   \item Second subquestion.
   \item Third subquestion.
  \end{enumerate}

  \newpage
  \section{}

\end{document}

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With my (first draft) final assignment in the can long ago and myself recovered, I can put TU100 firmly in my rearview mirror, much like a fox run over when you’re late for the airport.  I only have to talk about it again when I get my results, which will take a while.  How did I do on my de facto EMA?  Well, let’s take a look at what it covers:

  • A four page report on concepts relating nominally to “appropriate technology” for different socioeconomic landscapes, but in reality it’s … any report ever.  I’ve definitely nailed the structure, speaking to the right audience, defining my terms, and referencing.  But it’s arbitrary and my confidence lacks any justifiable source.  In a worst-case scenario, I could lose 10 out of 30 marks, but realistically probably 5.
  • A 200 word snip from a job application cover letter.  These are essentially free points, so I’m expecting the full 10 marks, but maybe 8.
  • Sense activity, full 50 marks, ‘nough said.
  • Understanding and normalising relational databases.  The technical side of this I’m very confident with, so this is more about my ability to describe the process, and present information in an appropriate form (in this case some tables).  I’ve defined every technical term within an inch of its life.  Maybe I’ve missed something and I’ll miss 2 of the 21 marks available.
  • A task involving understanding the Data Protection Act 1998, and security and encryption.  This task is possibly the best marriage of its explicit and implicit goals, as the explicit goals mentioned are highly relevant, and the implicit goals of tailoring your message to your audience appear to be equally weighted.  I’m again unduly confident here, but we’ll hedge another 2 out of 19 marks available.
  • A page of maths and the creation of a spreadsheet, full 40 marks.
  • Argument mapping.  This one’s difficult, as there’s lots of moving parts.  There’s logic, there’s reading comprehension, there’s technical detailing … It’s specifically stated that there’s no one answer, but that’s whatever the nice version of a lie is.  A fib?  It’s a fib.  The structure and progression of the questions give the game away.  The worst part is that we’re analysing what appears to be an Italian text that’s been run through Google Translate.  I re-did this portion completely three times, so I’m not excessively proud of my chances.  Maybe 25 out of 30 marks.
  • Risk analysis and the data security CIA triad (mentioned briefly in a MOOC review roundup).  So here’s the problem: I think this one is really about presenting information in an easy to understand format.  I’ve therefore shot for the moon on this one and presented it in a non-standard but easy-to-understand format.  This could backfire like a Chevy in winter.  Worst case is maybe 6 out of 10 marks.  On the other hand, I love the irony of taking an unnecessary risk in a task about risk analysis, so I’m not changing it.

This leaves 185 marks in a worst-case scenario from 210 non-skills marks.  That’s 88%.  If we assume that I do similarly dismally on the 40 skills marks (which would be 35), that’s still comfortably in the distinction range.  How likely is my worst case scenario?  Unlikely.  Realistically, I would mark it at 93-95%.

So how do I feel about TU100?  I don’t feel overwhelmingly like it was a waste of my time, but it’s a waste of money.  That much outdated and poorly constructed material is worth maybe £500.  I had a good tutor and good support from other tutors, but not really in line with the amount of money which was spent.  It did, however, give me an excellent chance to practise my skills.  And remind me how much I hate group tasks.  It’s for the best that it’s coming to an end, and I hope they A) pull the plug on Sense, and B) stop telling people not to take Scratch courses ahead of the module if they use Scratch going forward.

And studying at the Open University?  It’s brilliant.  It’s perfectly suited to my lifestyle.  I’m glad I’m taking it slowly, as I hit quite a few personal challenges and had to keep scaling things back over and over, but I was consistently able to keep up with the work.  I’m quite happy with the study prep I did, as it worked well.  I know the rest will be harder than this year, but I’m really looking forward to the next short five years.

Onto the greener pastures of TM129 and MST124, part-time student finance loans for the next academic year opened sometime in the last few days, so that’s sorted.  Much quicker this year than last in many ways.

And that brings me to … The first year of this blog being complete!  And I’ve written a lot.  I have no idea of what I’ll write about during the summer this year, but I’ll find something to keep me busy and learning.  Certainly I’m going to tackle as much of maths as I can before MST124, and somehow I don’t think that OpenLearn is going to be of much help.