OpenMusings

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.

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..?