While I’m complaining about M253… When I can get to the course calendar, it helpfully makes the above suggestions on what you should be doing this week. All of which rely on someone bothering to post the Milestone 2 document to the course website, and of course that’s noticeably not there. Very helpful. </snark>

Trying to submit TMA01 for M253, and I’m being greeted by this wonderful caption. Again. Seems the OU’s new web platform is best described as “shaky”.

TMA01 for M253 is due on Monday, and my team is deep into finalising the team portions of the TMA. Or we would be, if the OU website were playing ball:

Due to a problem, we’re currently unable to display your course content.
Our technical staff have already have been notified, and will be fixing it as soon as possible.
We apologise for the inconvenience.

Grrr. And Aaargh. Apparently it’s not just the M253 website that’s affected, so that makes me feel a little better (TMA extensions all round, anyone?), but still… Time to thwack OU tech support with a clue-by-four…

Completed the first task for M253 last Thursday. I’ve been saving posting it to the course forum to give me a chance to quickly go over it with a fresh mind, and because I didn’t want to be the first to post the activity – no-one likes a swot.

Just went to look it over & post it. It’s not there. Time Machine also doesn’t have a record of it, leading to the assumption that I’ve quit out of Word without saving the text.

Aaaaaaaarghh!!!!

Can’t believe I made that sort of schoolboy error. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got some speedy rewriting to do…

Yesterday was the M359 exam, and it’s going to go down in history as one I’d rather forget. There are a few things that went wrong with this:
- I misunderstood the whole block 5 thing, and assumed that each presentation would do one part and ignore the other. By the time I figured out that this wasn’t the case (yesterday morning), it was too late to do anything about it – and lo, wasn’t Embedded SQL one of the 20-pointers. ::headdesk::
- What revision I had done was limited by the arrival of our second child a few months back – she’s still in the high-maintenance phase, and while my wife does what she can, it certainly takes two – usually at the expense of study / revision time, so I had far less revision done than I would like to have had.
- Come the exam, even some of the subjects I had covered – just this week, usually – just didn’t stick, leaving me looking at a number of questions, hugely frustrated as I knew these subjects but couldn’t get the information from brain to paper.

So. My TMA scores were enough to leave a Distinction a possibility, but with the exam performance I reckon I’m looking at a Pass 4 or Pass 3 at best. Part of me is almost hoping for a bare fail so I can resit next year when Real Life may have settled down a bit – otherwise I suspect I’ll be unlinking this one and picking another course to take its place in my Honours calculations. We’ll see what happens when the result comes out in 6 weeks or so.

In the meantime, the course mailing for M253 has arrived, and goes down in history as being the most pointless mailing ever. We get:
- A(nother) copy of the Online Applications CD. That makes 14 copies of it that I now have.
- A(nother) copy of the Electronic TMA guide. See above.
- A copy of the “course news”, telling my everything else I need will be available from the course website, including future course news-sheets.

First, we all have broadband these days, just set up a students’ download page and save the money all those damn CD’s cost. Likewise, a PDF of the Electronic TMA guide would be plenty useful enough for those that need it – I have enough courses under my belt now that I need neither. With those gone, there would be no need for the mailing at all, thereby removing the need for packaging or postal costs. The OU’s been going on for a while about the need to control costs & raise student fees – well there’s a place to start on the cost-cutting that I doubt too many people would care about. It would even be environmentally-friendly.

Unexpectedly good:

Using my own method for converting learning outcomes into a percentage gave me a respectable 88%. I can live with that, all things considered..

Just need S151 to finish off my Certificate in Contemporary Science, but I’m putting that on the backburner for a while – want to get my nightmare courses of M359 and M253 out of the way before taking on anything else that’s not degree-related. Maybe next year…

Just got my registration in for the next course on my list – M253, Team-Working in Distributed Environments. If you read the course reviews for this one, you’ll find that there’s not a single nice thing to be said about it, with complaints about:
- it taking far more work than a 10-pointer should require;
- it having lousy course material and unhelpful tuition; and
- the “teamwork” aspect invariably leading to one or two people in each group doing all the work while the rest free-load their way to the points.
So let’s just say I’m not exactly looking forward to this one – but it’s specified on my degree, so I’m stuck with having to do it. Anyone out there have any good experiences of M253 to relate..?

S186 done & dusted, with the ECA submitted with about, oh, 5 minutes to spare. I think that’s a record for me in the “cutting it close” department. Enjoyed the course up to a point – the subject and course material I found fascinating, I was just hampered by a severe lack of time. Shouldn’t have any problems with passing it, but it’s not going to be as good a result as I could have got if I’d been able to give it my full attention.

With that done, attention switches back to M359. By my reckoning I’m about 3 weeks behind on the final stretch, so time to knuckle down and start working…

…except that the keyboard on my MacBook Pro has given up under the pressure of heavy-duty bashing. Or at least the ‘G’ key has – its keycap went flying across the room last week and hasn’t been seen since, so the laptop itself is winging its way back to Apple for a keyboard replacement. That’s anything between 2-5 working days until I have access to it again. One word: ARRRGH!

One last piece of news for this meandering post:

Considering that exam was done with pretty much no revision, I can’t complain about that result. Onwards! Sadly, the next unit will be the dreaded M253…

With about 3 weeks to go until the cut-off for S186 (this is my deferral date, so no further extensions), I’m just starting Chapter 5. This isn’t exactly where I wanted to be with this course, but domestic issues plus the dreaded M359 have meant it’s been on the backburner for a while. I’m now looking to “cheat” a little to get the ECA done & away on time (31st July) without neglecting M359, as I’m already behind on that.

That’s not “cheat” in the sense of doing anything the OU wouldn’t like, though – just in the sense of making sure I only cover the minimum of material needed to get the pass. Thankfully, the ECA is fairly clear about which questions relate to which chapters, so at this point I’m looking to just read the essentials (chapters 7, 8 & 11 for the questions I still have to do) and ignore the rest of the course for the moment – I can read the rest of TYVET at my leisure when I have more time to spare. With the course being a simple pass / fail one, there’s no real incentive to bust a gut looking for extra marks.

As for M359 – it’s still a huge timesink, but bar a disappointing TMA01 I’ve been doing okay with it. I can see myself having to abandon a large chunk of Block 4 for the time being (assessed by TMA03, which is already done & marked) in an effort to get back up-to-date ahead of TMA04. I’m doing the course in about 4 hours per week at the moment, which really isn’t enough – oh for another 8 hours a week of free time. Amazingly, a distinction still isn’t entirely out of the question – but with that needing a score of 92% on the final TMA to get my OCAS up to the required 85%, it’s unlikely. My confidence about the exam isn’t exactly high, either. Bah.

Edit: Aha. I forgot that substitution applies to M359 – which means that, assuming I can scrape 85% in the exam, I only need 85% on TMA04 and substitution will take care of the rest. Still unlikely, just not as unlikely.

M257 officially comes to an end on Wednesday, with its 3-hour exam on Wednesday morning. Normally I’d be looking forward a distinction – I love programming units, they’re right up my mental alley – but this time around it ain’t going to happen. Not because of lack of understanding – I’ve got an OCAS of 97.35% going into the exam, and it should’ve been higher bar a very inflexible marking scheme on some of the assignments – but I haven’t been able to give the course the attention it deserves. A combination of the dread M359 and the arrival of a new baby in the house a week ago have kept me from even looking at an M257 textbook since January. I’m planning to give the specimen paper a thorough going-over tomorrow, but that’s it as far as my revision for the exam goes – meaning that realistically, I’m looking at probably a Pass 3 at best. The perfectionist in me is screaming that this just won’t do, but unfortunately for him reality has other ideas.

On the bright side, the course doesn’t count in the Honours classification for BSc Computing and Systems Practice, which is the degree I’m working towards. The only slightly-related downside is that M359 does, and that could well be a trainwreck of note…