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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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Results have come in for the 2019/2020 academic year. This is a strange year for results, because they’re not necessarily based solely on the efforts of the students. For modules with cancelled exams (as opposed to those which substituted an EMA or did a home-exam alternative) students got an adjustment to their OCAS score in line with how module students have done on their OES relative to their OCAS over the last three years. As students typically do worse on their exams than on their coursework, in practice this means that students get a deduction of their OCAS based on previous years’ students.

It hasn’t been pretty. There are a lot of unhappy students, and some quite understandably so. Students of M250 are reporting deductions against their OCAS by as many as 10 marks, so you may have needed an OCAS of 95 to get a distinction. (Note that these figures are not verified, just social media chatter.)

My only module to fall into this category was M269. My OCAS was 95, and I got an adjustment down to 93.1 for my module result. Somebody else said a 5 mark difference cost them a distinction.

For TT284 and TM257, I had a standard EMA (with TM257 being informed by a very non-standard day school alternative). I didn’t do as well as I’d have liked on either (91 and 89 OES respectively) but I just couldn’t focus for anything in lock-down. And to paraphrase someone on the OU STEM Discord server, it reflects my effort level fairly.

Anyway, long story short, I’ll take three distinctions and run this year. It was never going to be easy doing three modules in the same year, so I’m grateful to have done it during a pandemic.

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I’m not overly enthusiastic on the portmanteau “Coronacation” as it implies that by working from home to keep ourselves and others safe during a pandemic, we’re not really working. We’re working. We’re pulling double time. There’s no longer any difference from our work and home lives, so work seems to intrude at all hours. Those who aren’t able to work are also working trying to get work. Plus we’re nearly all inadequate educators, now.

But I’m using the word differently, to describe trying to have a vacation from university while still in the latter part of the full (or nearly?) lockdown stage. I’m done with uni for this academic year! In fact, I submitted all my EMAs last week and have been recovering. And with three modules, I need a lot of recovering! I’m not ready to do full module reviews, yet, but figured I’d get this part out of the way.

I only gave myself a few days to do the TM257 EMA because it’s halfway done by the time the day school (or alternative thereof) is completed, and it’s in my wheelhouse, to boot. Mistake! Well, I mean, not a huge mistake. I got it done with a week to spare. But it was surprisingly tough.

The research question was shockingly broad. Like, people throw the phrase, “How long is a piece of string?” around, but imagine that was an actual exam question. Yeah. It was that broad. By the same token, though, it was great from both the perspective of learning networking details, and self-education. Regards to the module team, it was a top-notch question, and I enjoyed it. I also would still be in a blind panic over it if I hadn’t reached out to my very excellent tutor. I have never been so supported by a tutor as I was over that question.

The last question wasn’t difficult, but it fooled me! After I submitted it with some niggling questions at the back of my head, I was just gathering some documentation on the solution for my own notes, and something jumped out at me. My allegedly systematic approach had pole-vaulted over a step, and it would have cost me at least 4 marks and possibly a couple more.

All told, I’m happy with my submission, and am expecting somewhere in the neighbourhood of 84 to 97 marks on the EMA. The worst-case scenario is that I’m a border case.

(For the record, I finally figured out what I’d done wrong on the day school scenario. The question was written in an “okay” manner, it was really on my own shortsightedness that I missed it … And if it were me, I’d have deducted 4 marks instead of just 3.)

For TT284, the EMA was fairly straight-forward. The practical stuff was dead simple if you’ve done it before, and definitely doable if you hadn’t. In fact, if you can get an HTML form to work with a reference book beside you, you should do well on the EMA. The report side was mostly difficult in making choices; about what to discuss, which aspects to put forward, that sort of thing. In fact, I possibly didn’t answer the question for 1b, so I may resubmit that, but I did hit many points that an answer should have.

I feel I did somewhere between 86 and full marks on this one, but we’ll see.

Technically, I’m not quite on my Coronacation yet, as I’m going back now to look over M269 materials for units 6 and 7. On one hand, I’m glad I didn’t have the exam, because I don’t know how much time I would have had for primary study and revision this year. On the other … I’m really loving these blocks! I’m glad I’ve got a few months to catch up on them without deadlines, and can just enjoy the learning.

Within things that are in my control, my module results on M269 will be based entirely on our OCAS marks, but will not simply be our OCAS results. They’ll be applying an adjustment based on previous module cohorts’ exam results relative to their OCAS results. Regardless, I’d be surprised if I didn’t get a distinction from this module.

None of which matters! I’ve crunched the (fairly complex) numbers, and realised that so long as I get two distinctions at stage 3, nearly every path leads to the same degree classification. As long as I pass my three modules this year, it’s all the same in the end.

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So many people seem to be struggling under Coronavirus Lock-down situations across the globe. And I’m one of them. My mental health is taking a battering. Not a start-to-tidy-up-my-affairs-and-post-a-youtube-goodbye kind of battering, more a I’m-going-to-throw-away-all-my-socks-because-wearing-socks-is-a-social-construct-and-besides-then-I-can-buy-and-wear-all-new-socks kind of battering. There may be only the slimmest of margins between the two, frankly.

But really, overall, I’m bossing it. My children are doing beautifully under their home schooling curriculum. My four-year-old has finally taken the strides from letter recognition to confident word reader. (His older brother learned to read at two, for which YouTube and he receive absolutely all of the credit. This one is all me his mother, though.) My older son has gone up several months in his maths. I don’t really know what else a nine-year-old who’s been reading since he was two needs to know, though, so he’s honestly probably falling behind in absolutely everything else. But whatever, he’ll smash those year 6 SATs next year. Which is what education is all about. (Don’t worry, I had to clean up the mess after I said that and was sick. I’ve paid for it.)

At work, we’re leading the charge. I’m not likely to go into much detail, but an IT department in a school is doing exactly the kind of rewarding work I envisioned when I chose to step out of the commercial sector.

And now, at the OU, I’m absolutely on top of things. (Note: By “on top of things” I mean I’m not drowning by having a cliff dropped on top of me. Right now, it feels like being on top of things.) Both of my modules with EMAs are continuing mostly as normal, and both of them have sub-projects to complete next week before the actual EMA.

For TM257, instead of the day school, we’re getting a packet tracer activity, instead. I’ve submitted it and got full marks except a single portion that … doesn’t make any sense as written. It’s been made clear to the module chair that marks are being dropped because the question is unintelligible, rather than assessing the learning outcomes, but that didn’t seem to reach. Still, 90% isn’t bad, and I’ve still got half the EMA to go.

For TT284, there’s a (very small) portion of a project plan that needs to be submitted several weeks early. Whoever thought of this, my hat’s off to them. Because there are marks for it, students will take planning their project seriously. Because there are so few marks for it, their success or failure won’t hinge on the quality of the plan. It just drives home the importance of actually having a plan to complete on time. It’ll be hard to argue that we weren’t prepared for how much effort we’d need to put in.

The one thing that’s really getting me, though, is how little time I have left over. Parent, employee, teacher … We’re all struggling with fulfilling all these roles right now. But there’s a deadline on self-improvement for some of us, and that deadline was determined when nothing like this seemed possible. It’s just … Much.

And while I was thinking about that, I realised that there are tens of thousands of others doing exactly what I’m doing at the same university. So I reached out to some of them. There’s a Discord server that acts as the home of the OUSA’s STEM club. I guess. Iunno. It’s not on the OUSA’s list of clubs. Maybe they’re rogue. Either way, I went to see if they understood what I’m going through, and realised that I understand what they’re going through. I found my peoples. I didn’t know I had peoples.

If I’m honest (which … probably not) I’m probably going to stick around just until I get the green light to leave my house again. Which I won’t do, I love being stuck in my house. But I can then send my family out of my house and have a few minutes to breathe and I can stop sharing my study desk with my work. But it’s really helped my stress levels this week to run into others who are going through it, too. Their invite link is at http://oucr.club/ if anybody else wants a very relaxed, friendly chat with people who get it.

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TMA03 for TT284 is due today, and I just started it on Tuesday. Nothing like blind panic to keep your coding skills keen. I’m not really satisfied with how the assessment lined up with what the materials taught, but it did line up with the learning outcomes. It seems as though this block intended more robust independent study, which is fine, but the schedule was exceptionally tight if that was expected. If anybody reads this prior to a future pesentation of TT284, be aware that if you don’t already have a healthy grasp of JavaScript, coding for streams, or both, the TMA could take a considerable amount of time. (The module team estimates the time required at 10 hours. That’s probably close to how long I took, but I may have just been lucky.)

How did I do? On the coding front, I ran into two stumbling blocks. The first was due to my confusion over the difference in JavaScript between using a function as an argument, and using a variable which references that function. (It took me about an hour of research later on to realise how I’d fixed the problem and why it was necessary, which led to me tidying up the code.) The second was because I had read through a practical activity in the materials rather than running through it to save time, so I was leaving out a step in the TMA. So I think I did alright on the practical portion of it.

The report section is much weaker than my normal efforts, and it’s mostly because I couldn’t really force myself to care. This TMA is worth 34% of my OCAS, and the other 66% currently has full marks. So long as I get a mark of 55, my OCAS will round up to 85 or higher, and that portion of my result will be a distinction. Assuming my coding is perfect (it’s not, but I should get most marks), I only need 5 marks from the report. Heck, the diagram I put in there ought to be worth 5 marks, so I’m just not going to stress about it. I think I might get a 90 on this one.

So now I’m hastily rushing back to M269 which has its second and final TMA due in two weeks. I was a little concerned over how much work there was to do in it until I opened up my TMA template for M269, and saw that I’d gotten a decent start on it all the way back before Christmas, when my best self was still diligently ignoring how tough three modules were next to full time employment and full time parenting. It’s rough, but I might pull through it after all.

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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.

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Much to my surprise, I’ve made a fair amount of progress in each of my three modules, and I’m not hating any of them. I’ve even gotten into the first TMAs already. Rationally, I know this means that I simply don’t understand how little I must understand. Things going well typically means that I’m not really paying attention.

I’ve been through two tutorials, for TT284 and TM257. Neither one added much beyond what was already in the module guides, but it was nice to ‘meet’ my tutors. (Since my weakest area isn’t in learning the material, but in guessing what the tutors want to see in evaluations, this is sort of important … If I care much about the assessments as anything more than a callibration of my own self-evaluation. And I try not to care … but then revision lands me with two months of tension headaches because I’m desperate for a clear distinction.)

I’ve got a tutorial next week for M269, but my tutor won’t be doing any tutorials this year. At all. She’s also thus far been entirely absent from the tutor group forum. History at the OU has taught me that these are ill portents. Or maybe it’s my inner (and outer) pessimist. As the module seems so well written, though, I imagine it might be much like the MST124 maths module, where all my feedback was late, consisted of, “That’s correct,” but it didn’t matter anyway and I learned loads more than I thought possible.

I’ve got myself a few days breathing room. I’m caught up through the first three weeks in all modules, and don’t want to go further than two weeks ahead. That can cause a lot of problems when I slack off later in the academic year because I’m so far ahead, and it’s difficult to renew my efforts. So last night, tonight, and tomorrow, I don’t have much to do. Enjoy it while it lasts, right?

I’m halfway through the first TMAs for TM257 and M269. There’s a question in M269 to evaluate a hypothetical paper that I could probably get out of the way tonight. At first glance, it looks like a waffle piece, but it’s really about viewing your own assignment answers through the eyes of a tutor. This helps your own self-evaluation skills, as well as callibrates your view of work with your tutor’s, so it’ll take the place of a first tutorial in my mind. I’ll talk more about that later when I’m done with the TMA and evaluate my own effort on it.

You basically need to have the first six weeks behind you for the first TMA in TT284. Since I’m not skipping that far ahead, it’ll have to wait. It seems poor planning to me to have essentially a single question on a TMA, because going by the way the module was designed, you’d have negative-two days to write your entire TMA. My tutor was explicit that students should not make an effort to get ahead, so they might have some very bad nights ahead of them if they’re not paying attention. I’ll say it again: Get ahead early, and stay ahead. (Just maybe not too far ahead.)

I haven’t mentioned anything about the TM257 Cisco NetAcad materials, as they hadn’ t opened by my last post. They have, now, and they’re brilliant. I’ve always avoided buying Cisco materials in the past, because they’re just so expensive. But I’m not going to worry about price any more. These materials are written in a way that is completely compatible with my brain and my learning. They build proper context in the proper order, rather than jumping right in the deep end of telling to memorise abstract layers of an abstract model of networking that is so abstract that it doesn’t actually apply to anything in the real world that wasn’t intentionally built to reflect it. I’ve never even come across another networking course that taught the TCP/IP model before the OSI model, when that seems obvious to me.

It also helps that my tutor knows this stuff cold. And better than that, he seems able to communicate it to the students who haven’t had much (or any) experience. One negative, though, is that he hasn’t updated his first tutorial materials to discuss the changes to Cisco CCNA certification process. He was still telling students there were two tests, and didn’t mention that the evaluated material in the modules (as they stand) might not cover the WiFi and other new parts of the exam. (The module isn’t really about certification, though: There are cheaper and faster ways to get that.) Anyway, after over twenty years in this industry, just the three weeks I’ve already been through have managed to give me that mental tweak I’ve been needing to see networks through the perspective of Cisco. It’s a really helpful module.

I’ll probably post next when I’ve got a TMA out of the way, or possibly after my next tutorial.

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My characteristic advice for Open University study is always: Get ahead early, and stay ahead. This is because real-life considerations invariably impede study at some point during the year, and it’s easier to absorb these if you’re ahead. It’s much more difficult to catch up if you fall behind. Because of this, I like to get one or two weeks ahead of the schedule before study begins in earnest.

This year, I nearly didn’t make it. I’ve just now finished getting a bit ahead after the module websites have been open for two full weeks. I tried switching to hand-written notes to aid in memory retention. The result is that I accomplished in a week and a half what normally takes me three days to do. And when I think about it, memory retention is not a study problem I have. My weakest point is guessing what tutors want to see. New strategies for dealing with this are where I should be spending my planning time.

Anyway, I’ve swapped back to digital cloud-based notes, and finally caught up to where I wanted to be. Or maybe just a bit ahead. I’ve still got nearly two weeks to go before the official beginning of my academic year, so I have time to make any other adjustments that are necessary. With three modules going simultaneously, I really need to concern myself with speed and the best results with the shortest effort.

M269 appears to be just what I thought it would be: It’s a very mature module with a well-planned structure and resources that make sense for the subject matter.

TT284 is slightly less encouraging. There’s a requirement to misuse forums as group engagement which is obviously wrong-footed. If the goal is engagement, you need a problem more engaging than throwing words at a wall which nobody will ever read. It appears to be endemic of the module, so far: Short-sighted decisions based on ticking boxes handed down from above. This weak structure will make the module a bit annoying, but shouldn’t affect the quality of its content.

TM257 is a mystery. As it’s based nearly entirely on Cisco’s NetAcad curriculum, most of the structure really lies with Cisco, and will be unavailable until I have a tutor. The content should be very strong, though. The module team got a bit lazy with the assessment strategy, only saying that some activities contribute to different aspects of assessment. They haven’t expressed how much they contribute, which is rather the point of the assessment strategy. But I think they were just a bit rushed to press. They’ll probably correct that in time. (They’ve probably got their hands full rewriting every paragraph that mentions the obsolete CCENT.)

TM257 also doesn’t appear to allow students to work ahead (though it could just be poorly phrased descriptions). For the reasons detailed above, this seems short-sighted to me and better suited to classroom study than the realities of distance learning.

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I’ve received two emails from the OU this week in relation to two of the modules I’m starting in October: TM257 and TT284. Their titles were nearly identical, but their content was rather different.

For TM257, which I happened to read whilst on holiday, it had an offer to prepare for the module by creating a Cisco NetAcad account, logging in and downloading the Cisco Packet Tracer network simulation environment, and taking a short course on its use. I thought this was cool, created the account, and put it out of my head for a while. I figured the TT284 email would be much the same, and I made a note to check both of them out in more detail after I got back.

I did the Packet Tracer course today. I’m quite happy to get my hands on Packet Tracer, to have a bit of a play with it before the module. I know how slowly things are going to move at the module’s start, but it’ll help at least a little. I had fun trying to do a Packet Tracer Activity without watching the accompanying video. I thought I’d completed it in just about five minutes, but it was slightly over half an hour before I’d gotten the activity to agree that I’d completed all the tasks it was asking for.

The course itself wasn’t terribly helpful, as it’s mostly going to be over the heads of non-networking people, and fairly basic for any networking people. As is so extremely common with OU materials, it’s a solution without an actual audience. They really need to work on serial development from one year to the next, so these gaps don’t engulf the majority of the intake. It took me just over an hour (due to taking an inordinate amount of time on that one activity, which ideally should have only taken 7 minutes, but I wouldn’t have learned as much), so it was cheap in terms of my investment. Over all, I appreciate the offer and the effort. (It’s rewritten for last year’s TM257, but is already outdated as the CCNA paths no longer look at ALL like it did a year ago. On one hand, it’s not the TM257 team’s fault that it’s changed so drastically so quickly. On the other, everybody in this industry knows how often this happens, and we know not to plan anything that depends on it being static. I hope they’ve got better clarity on the road map by the actual start in October. I know Cisco is willing to help them if they reach out for specific help.)

TT284, on the other hand … Well, despite the similar title of the email, it had nothing at all to do to help students prepare for TT284. It was a link to the Are You Ready For quiz for TT284, along with an explanation that it was a student’s fault if they didn’t do well on the module, despite students being assured they’ve been prepared if they’ve passed all the courses leading up to TT284. And that’s it. And the questions in the AYRF quiz boil down to, “Are you able to write HTML by hand, and have you written a lot of programs outside of OU study?” It’s frankly insulting and reads like a disclaimer. If students aren’t getting enough out of their previous years’ study to do well on this module, it should be addressed at the end of those modules. And real resources should be offered to the students, rather than a general, “You suck at HTML. Good luck sorting it out!”

I get that university study is learning how to learn at a deep level, rather than being spoon-fed knowledge, but the OU has convinced its students that they’re ready for something they’re not, and then told them it’s their fault for not being ready. Again, this would be better handled were there better serial links from one module to the next in both materials and assessment/feedback. At the very least, TT284 could learn a lot from the TM257 staff.