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>

There’s only so much studying you can do ahead of an exam, and there’s a certain sinking feeling you get when you revise a chunk of a block and then, come the exam, find that both questions relating to that block (Part A of the T224 paper has two questions per block) come from the parts you didn’t have time to do. I got that sinking feeling in this exam. Q5 & Q6 were the guilty questions (ISO7816 smartcards and Bluetooth SCO & ACL links, for the curious), worth a total of 16 marks. I was just 6 marks short of a Distinction – so guess where I likely lost those marks. I’m something of a perfectionist, so yes, frustration with myself was the emotion of the day – but at least this won’t count towards my Honours classification…

- Wrote to my MP for the first time over the ELQ funding issue – which affects me, as it would knock short courses on the head, along with the idea I’ve been toying with of doing a BSc(Hons) Physical Science once my current degree is out of the way. Positive reply form her, and she’s signed the Early Day Motion, so I’m fairly happy with that. For all the good it’ll do, knowing this Government…

- T224 complete & results are out – Pass 2, which I’m a little disappointed but not surprised about, as I was caught out by a number of exam questions around Block 3 of the course (Bluetooth, specifically). It doesn’t count towards my Honours classification, so I can live with it. More on that later…

- S199 – which I’ve complained about previously – ended up deferring to the January submission date. I ended up starting it from scratch again – fortunately, it’s made a lot more sense the second time around, so I’m a lot more confident about it now.

- M359 and S186 kick off in February. Since they overlap with the end of M257, it’s going to be a busy few months…

- …which will also coincide with the arrival of our 2nd child, due in June. So is the M257 exam. This could be a problem…

- along with all the OU stuff, I’ve also been taking work-related exams. I now hold Certified Ethical Hacker and Computer Hacking Forensic Investigator certifications. If I ever get to use them, work’s going to get a lot more interesting…

Busy few months passed. Busier few months coming. One word: eek…

From the courses I’m doing, the Txxx & Mxxx courses are all full one-year units that involve real work – the Sxxx courses are the fun little 2-month fillers I do for personal interest and to keep my mind ticking over between units. Unless it’s S199, which is rapidly turning into a nightmare of global-warming proportions. ^^;

I can’t help but wonder: Why!? If you’re so past caring that you don’t even attempt a question, why bother turning up, as a no-show is the same as a nul-points in the end – and I can’t see the exam paper having been so scary to anyone that they couldn’t attempt anything.

One of those questions that’s destined to remain unanswered, but definitely made me curious…

• Assign a score of 0-4 to each Learning Objective, so that:
  • 0 = Not Achieved
  • 1 = Not Quite Achieved
  • 2 = Just Achieved
  • 3 = Achieved
  • 4 = Well Achieved
• Multiply out the number of Learning Outcomes tested by the course / ECA by 4, to get a maximum possible score.
• Tally up the points for each LO to give a total score
• Convert to a percentage to give yourself a meaningful result

So, using S194 as an example (as it’s what I have to hand) – the ECA paper lists 16 Learning Objectives that the paper tests. 16*4 = 64, so when I finally get the results I can go through the feedback and work out my total out of 64. (Total/64)*100 = a percentage score for the course.

As methods go, it’s a bit of a blunt instrument – it treats all LOs as equal, when in practice there should really be some weighting applied as some will be harder to prove than others – but as a rough-and-ready method to get a percentage score for comparison purposes & for self-motivation, it would work.

Although I’d much rather the OU did that for me.

What that screenshot doesn’t show is the OES score (because I keep such things to myself) – which seems to be an endangered species at the moment. This presentation of S197 was the last that will give a score, the current presentation of S194 that I’m working on won’t give a score, and that little habit will soon be spreading to other courses, apparently. I’m not happy about this. Read on below the cut for why…

According to the OU, percentage scores aren’t useful in giving feedback to students on where they went wrong on a course and how they could improve. They also don’t tell employers who are looking at your qualification what you’ve proved you can do. The alternative is to mark against a course’s Learning Outcomes – so in future, you’ll get “Just Achieved”, “Achieved” or “Well Achieved” against a Learning Outcome to indicate a pass, or “Not Quite Achieved” or “Not Achieved” to indicate a fail. There’s a post in OUSA 10-Pointers by the Course Chair of SK183, Audrey Brown, explaining the full rationale behind all of this, if you’re interested, along with a rather heated debate on the subject. Guess where I got the inspiration for this post…

I have no problem with the OU providing feedback against the Learning Outcomes – indeed, any feedback against a result can only be a good thing – but I don’t see why the percentage mark has to be abandoned to do it, other than as a result of pandering to political correctness. The score serves several useful purposes, not least in being a motivational tool – for me, each course is a constant quest to push the scores higher, to see what I can get, and the result for one course acts as the baseline for the next. A simple “Pass” doesn’t provide that motivation. Even going back in the process to look at assessment – in the ECA for S197, for example, you can look at each question, see the number of marks on offer, and work out from that how much information you need to provide (no point writing three paragraphs for a 2-point question). With the ECA for the current S194 presentation, by comparison, you can’t do that – some questions specify “two or three sentences” to clue you in, but not all, and you generally have no idea what the weighting of a particular question may be. How does that help? The point has also been made by others that, if you’re trying to decide what courses to take with one eye on the classification of a future degree, you want to take the courses where you’ve got the best chance of gaining a high mark, and the new “achieved” comments don’t help you do that.

I don’t see what the issue would be with providing both a percentage score and feedback against the learning outcomes. I truly think to OU are making a mistake here – I just hope enough pressure can be brought to bear to make them see a little sense.

But there is a way that some people can get hold of a copy of MS Office 2007 Enterprise Edition (which includes OneNote), direct from Microsoft, for just £17.49 including postage & packaging. Details below the cut.

The key is, you need to be working for a company that has some sort of volume licensing agreement with Microsoft – usually either an Enterprise Agreement or a Software Assurance Agreement. These usually (but not always) also include membership of Microsoft’s Home Use Program, which allows employees of companies that have signed up to the program to buy Office for just a nominal shipping charge. Technically, if you then leave the company you have to stop using any applications you bought under the Home Use Program, but that’s not exactly easy for Microsoft to police.

You’ll need your company’s “program key” to access the HUP website – you should be able to get this from your IT department, but from personal experience you’ll need to be a bit more creative than just ‘phoning the Helpdesk to get it. While a volume licensing agreement gets companies onto HUP, very few seem to do anything to promote it (or even realise the facility is there), so you may need to speak to someone a bit higher in the food chain to get the required details. Be persistent.

Once you have the program key, just go to the HUP website, enter your details, and Microsoft will email you a link to the program’s ordering page. Allow a few weeks for delivery, and you’re sorted. Microsoft have a FAQ page for HUP, here.