OpenMusings

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.

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.

In amongst all my grumbling about M359, I’d mentioned that I though moving on to Block 3, and it’s more programming-style SQL content, would make life a whole lot easier.

I started on Block 3 this evening, and it was like a metaphorical weight being lifted from my shoulders – as expected, SQL queries are much more suited to my mindset, and come with the added advantage that, when I’m trying to figure a query out, I can just feed it into the query analyser and see if the results match expectations. That in itself makes the content a lot easier to work with – the relational algebra of Block 2, you had to work though entirely in your head or on paper, with no guarantee that you were following the methods the course book expected.

According to the course calendar, Block 3 should take 8 weeks to cover – I’m hoping now I’ll have a chance to work up some leeway, so I can get back to other pressing matters: M257, with the exam in early June, and S186, where I’ll be deferring the ECA to the 2nd submission date.

The horror that is M359 continues. I’ve just finished Block 2, the final part of which was all about Normal Forms – 1NF, 2NF, 3NF, BCNF… The chapter started with the ominous warning that…

..students often find the topic of normal forms to be quite difficult. Be aware that you might have to spend more time on this section than on some of the previous sections and that you may have to read parts of the material several times.”

It then launched into a series of examples and mathematical definitions of the various Normal Forms, and I admit a lot of it just went whoosh over my head – I was working through the relevant TMA question along with the chapter, and the chapter introduction wasn’t wrong about having to read and re-read everything before enough of it sank in to make the TMA understandable, never mind doable. Not a pleasant experience.

But right at the end of the chapter, the short section of BCNF takes all that information, all the finding of Functional Dependencies, all the details explanations, and cuts it down to one simple concept: if you have a relation with duplicate data, project over it to create 2-3 new relations that match the FDs. If you still have duplication, do it again. Read that, it looks to be as though 1NF is your original table, 2NF is 2nd attempt (after splitting once), 3NF the third attempt (after splitting twice) – and put like that, it suddenly seems so much more simple.

Now why couldn’t they have put it like that in the first place!? The obvious answer is that the exam is going to ask about the gory details behind the fairly simple explanations – that worries me, but for now I’m just glad to get another chapter out of the way. Onwards to SQL itself…

I’m still plugging away at M359 – normally I’d wait until a TMA is returned before ploughing on into the next one, but with only 1 month between TMA01 and TMA02, there isn’t time. Block 2 is mostly relational algebra – algebra is I think one of those things that everyone remembers from school with dread, and the way it works on relational databases is no more enjoyable, so at the title says, my head is turning to mush just trying to figure it out.

In short: I’m not enjoying this course…

M359 continues, and continues to really test me. Got TMA01 in with 6 days to spare – the latest I’ve been with an assignment submission in nearly three years with the OU – and I was as glad to see it go as I was to see the S199 ECA go. That’s not really a good feeling when you realise there’s still three TMAs and an exam to come…

They don’t give you much time before TMA02, either – it’s due in a month, so there’s no time to take a breather before delving back into the course. Block 2 seems to be mostly relational theory, with the emphasis on converting back and forth between relational models and entiti-relationship diagrams – it’s very dry material, and very hard going, as the subject is just abstract enough that I find it hard to really concentrate enough on the details for them to sink in. Fun, fun, fun. I think my chances of a distinction on this one are remote – and that’ll have a huge knock-on effect on my hopes for a first-class degree classification. Aaargh.

On the bright side, Block 3 approaches, and that’s all SQL. I’m quite looking forward to that, on the assumption that SQL is at heart a “programming” language, and my scores on the Java courses have showed I have an aptitude there. Hopefully that’s not a misconception….

So M359 Relational Databases: Theory & Practice is my first foray into the world of Level 3 courses. Choosing it was an easy decision – I use databases a lot in my day-job (I work in IT), and as a hobbyist (there’s a MySQL database storing the contents of this site, and several others I own), so there’s a natural interest in knowing what’s going on behind the scenes and, hopefully, learning how to do things with them that the scripts I’m currently using won’t allow (although that would also mean learning PHP, and there are time issues that might get in the way of that). So there’s no lack of motivation for this course – a good thing, as it will also count towards my honours classification. Cue scary music.

The OU’s quite open about there being a gap between what’s expected of students at level 2 and at level 3, but there’s a particular word in the course description for this one that I hadn’t noticed before now:

This is a challenging Level 3 course. Level 3 courses build on study skills and subject knowledge acquired from studies at Levels 1 and 2. They are intended only for students who have recent experience of higher education in a related subject, preferably with the OU.

I’ve got the level 2 experience, I’m highly literate – but it’s that word “challenging” that worries me, and if some of the comments I’ve read on First Class about the course hold true, in this context it means “Sucker!! You’re going to fail!”. Hmm.

I have worked through one study session with the course so far, and all I can say at the moment is that there’s a lot of text to work through, although as is usual with Computing courses there are some good exercises along the way to back up the materials & having a natural interest in the subject does help the information stick in the mind. But for the next 8 months I’m going to have a string of warnings ringing in the back of my head…